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by use, the skin of the hand is thickened. A pipe is not strengthened by drawing water through it, muscles are strengthened by the increased circulation that goes with labor. The engine does not absorb a wheel that has dropped out of the circuit, the living organism by atrophy reduces or wholly removes the superfluous part. Why this difference ? This is the riddle of life. This is the question that evolution cannot answer. A mere statement of the law leaves it as one of those primary principles which make up the regimen of life and discloses it as a new thing in the world.

§ 4. In the enumeration, therefore, of the laws by which the organic world is brought forward, those forces which are the expression of existing physical conditions constitute but an insignificant part of the whole. The reasons, then, which make for evolution and those which make against it, are both very imperative. How shall they be reconciled ? If we grant the presence of a spiritual agency the difficulty disappears. If evolution takes place along definite lines of growth with variable increments, every causal force is retained in free activity, and the continuity and systematic character of the results are fully explained. But this is theism, and the organic world calls for it by a large amount of the most important phenomena, intellectually considered, which are unexplained by any other view.

(1) The definite plan in leading and secondary divisions of plants and animals finds an immediate reason. The divisions and subdivisions of these