But Agassiz?

Ah, yes, I am sorry that he still permits fools to misunderstand him. They are afraid to ask him whether or not he means, by "independent creations," that a shape, as elephant or alligator, was moulded from clay; and he is willing to atone for his Diversity Theory by not denying their claim that he is with the Church in this question. Every naturalist knows that he is not, and that he can not be; that with him "independent creation" means only the working of abnormal forces; that in the maxim which he has done more than any man living to establish, Omne vivum ex ovo, he builds the sepulchre and writes the epitaph of this ChaosTheory.

Gentlemen, we are willing enough that, if the tongue and the work of Agassiz must part company, the Church shall have the former, and the believers in Science and God the latter. Yet they are not hopelessly apart.

'Fossils teach us," says Agassiz, "that these Thoughts ❞— so he finely calls the various animal species" in their present manifestations, are but the further development of the same fundamental idea which has prevailed through all geological periods, from the beginning to the end, in intimate connection. Animal forms of the same types occur in successive modifications through all these periods, and in a progressive series we may trace the fishes, followed by reptiles, birds and mammalia to the appearance of man, in such connection and such regular gradation as to indicate that they all belong to the same fundamental plan, and that whether we view them with reference to their successive appearance upon earth or in the complications of their structure, or in the phases of their embryonic growth, they represent, in every way, modifications of the same thoughts."

But Agassiz has declared this connection to be exclusively ideal?

Then our reply is, Cuique credendum sua arte. Agassiz is a great naturalist; as such we love and honor him that he is also a genius in the supersensual and philosophical realm, the world has no evidence. We are ready to draw a sharp line between Agassiz the Zoologist and Agassiz the Theologian.

But, fortunately, Agassiz has developed a region of Science in the world which shows this ideal connection between the various orders to be accompanied and symbolized by a physical connec

tion. It is the Science of Sciences, EMBRYOLOGY. It is established beyond a doubt that each of the higher forms, in its embryonic processes, repeats the animal forms which have preceded it in the strata of the earth. The higher animal is like that which grows, and that which swims, and that which creeps, ere it is born to its higher posture. Sometimes the man is born with some animal feature, which tells the path he has been coming. He may have a hare-lip; but every lip is at one time a hare-lip.

Shall we then doubt whether this development has taken place in the history of the earth? But in every embryo it is proved that the very thing does take place; species passes into species. For all purposes of science the egg is a miniature world- Nature. exists in leasts.

Lavater comes in, too, to show, in our various faces, the traces of every animal in the barnyard and the forest; and our every-day speech bears witness to our experience that men are aristocratic relations of the animals. Who does not know the Social Fauna? Who has not heard the tramp of hoofs and manifold brayings and hissings and bellowings in his parlor?

If one should ask you why the trees are not clothed with verdure and adorned with blossoms to-day, why birds are not mating, or chickens breaking their shells, what would be your reply? That a miracle was needed to produce those effects? You would say: "The perpetual miracle which Nature is can do all these things in their season. There must be another relation of the earth to the sun ere these things can take place." Well, we know that there are larger periods to our world than we can measure : it has regular motions, diurnal and annual; but another towards the constellation Hercules and Vega is approaching to be PoleWe can not yet compute all orbits or cycles. We can not tell the larger, but doubtless regular, seasons; we do not know through what meteoric changes the earth has gone we know that they have been great by fire, flood and electricity. Until we do know those unusual states, we can not say what it was that so changed the seed of one plant or the egg of one animal that it was attempered to a variety, which in the ages flowered to a new species or even genus. We know that if modification of climate, and care, can change a bitter almond to a peach, an insipid gourd to a melon, greater changes, with the care of a greater Being, need not be narrowed in results or in our conception.

star.

Is it asked, Why, if this was the plan and law of Creation, do we not see it producing new species now ?-our reply is, that the reign of man is not exhausted, only begun. He is now electricity and caloric to the world is not his genius procreative? is not the telegraph a fine variety? is not the Great Eastern a fine specimen ? In and through the Human World alone Creation is now going on. But, observe: there are no chasms or leaps! The children of Civilization repeat the ignorance and vehemence of ancestral savages, even of animals. Each grade of civilization is developed from the last. There is no independent formation; Greece, and Palestine, and Rome survive. Religion begins far back in the spiritual fern-growths of Judea: Jesus is no independent origin- "the glory of my people Israel "- the flower of their nation and religion. All forms of Christianity are varieties, selected from past forms; the Passover, the Sabbath, the washing of proselytes in baptism, the worship of gods and goddesses, the Platonic and Brahminic Trinity, the vestal celibacy-these have passed only in name and form. It is our old Protean nature at last; the embryo of Limited Monarchy is quickened to Republicanism; the Mother Church conceived in some happier mood, and gave birth from her own womb to the Protestantism which superseded her. Creation never ceases: it is Eternal incubation. A god was cradled in the first germ-cell.

PASSIONS OF THE CURVES.

[From the French of Toussenel.]

DID I not say that it was impossible to touch one branch of the Tree of Science without shaking them all. I had promised myself not to say one word about passional geometry, but how avoid a misfortune when both logic and passion lead you into it! Since I have inadvertently fallen into the hornet's nest, let me try to draw myself out of the scrape by the theory of conic sections.

Q. Why are all the points of the circumference equally distant from the centre, in the circle, first section of the cone, first closed curve? Why are all the radii equal?

A. Because the circle is the figure of friendship, the cardinal passion of infancy, which admits no order, nor rank, nor hierarchy; and where the tone of equality and of familiarity prevails.

Here all individuals are equal, like the radii of the circle, and the form of the group tends fatally to the round. The little Viennese dancers, who had such success on the scene of the great opera of Paris, and who were, I think, thirty-two in number, were never more applauded than when they executed circular evolutions. The figures preferred by childhood invariably affect the round form, the ball, the hoop, the marble; also the fruits which it prefers : the cherry, the gooseberry, the apple, the preserve tart. I am again obliged to stop at the first word, because I feel myself in danger of engaging in the highest considerations of passional gastrosophy and gymnastics, two more new sciences; two notes of a scientific scale whose pivot is passional hygiene, a cardinal science, whose office is to purge the globe and humanity from all their physical and moral maladies.

But, without speaking of gymnastics, or rather, of passional gymnosophy, let us adduce those games of groups of children at the Tuilleries (or other free play-grounds ). The analogist, who has observed these games with continued attention, has not failed to remark a characteristic difference in the choice of amusements, and the favorite exercises of the children of the two sexes. It is all natural; the major sex has its strength to develop, the other its grace; each does its best to exercise its muscles in the direction of its destinies. The boy learns to run and to wrestle, because he is destined for the race and the struggle. The girl not being under the same necessity, as she is not destined to contest and to run, but to be contested and run after, the young girl generally abstains from these violent exercises. She knows well that her little feet have not been formed for marching, but for dancing; for woman has this in common with the most charming types of the feline race, that she leaps and bounds with more ease and grace than she runs, and she does not try to force the vocation of her little feet. What, then, has our observer remarked in the character of the games of feminine infancy? He has remarked in the character of these games a decided proclivity toward the ellipse.

I observe among the favorite exercises of feminine infancy, the shuttlecock and the jumping-rope; the shuttlecock, a poor winged heart, that is tossed from one to the other, with all the artifices of coquetry; the rope, the high-school of suppleness, grace, and elasticity. Both the rope and the cord describe parabolic or elliptical curves. Why so? Why yet so young, this preference of

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the minor sex for the elliptical curve, this manifest contempt for marbles, ball, and top? Because the ellipse is the curve of love, as the circle is that of friendship. The ellipse is the figure in which God with His artist hand has profiled the form of His favorite creatures, woman, the swan, the Arabian horse, the dove; the ellipse is the essentially attractive form. The ellipse has two foci! Two foci like love; two foci, in each of which all the rays proceeding from the other are fatally absorbed; as in true love, where not a thought leaves the heart of one of the two lovers, which does not find its resting-place in the other. Is not this shut curve, whose foci mutually absorb their rays, the true image of that world of lovers, which is only peopled with two beings-her and him? Does not the definition of the ellipse answer well to this: Love is the selfhood of two!

Before this explanation, the astronomers were generally ignorant why the planets describe ellipses, and not circumferences, around their pivot of attraction; they now know as much of this mystery as I do. But let us pursue the course of the conic sections.

The ellipse is torn and opens; one of the foci has broken its confinement, and the radii of the other go to seek through the infinite the fugitive focus which they no longer meet. Then ill tongues say that the monotony of the conjugal tie has provoked separation, and, generalizing from the particular case, conclude that marriage is the tomb of love.

But the ellipse may disappear only to be transformed into the parabola; and in this the conscientious analogist finds nothing scandalous, but on the contrary quite natural, that the ellipse, curve of love, should engender the parabola, curve of familism, as love engenders the family. When children come, it is necessary that the exclusive mutual absorption of the parents should exhaust its ardor, and that the selfhood of the two should become that of three, four, or five. One of the foci has disappeared, it is very true, but the tenderness of the father and of the mother now radiates toward the infinite-toward future generations, to which the present generation is linked by children. This faculty of radiation in the parabolical curve explains to you why the parabolic mirror ( reverberator) is the most reflecting of all mirrors, why the yellow ray, color of familism, is the most luminous of all the colors of the prism. Decamps, Eugene Delacroix, Diaz, Baron,