tion, it must always be remembered that he is, above all things, a devotee of what is called "natural theology." In his discussions concerning the character of the relationships between the various members of the animal kingdom, the foreground of his consciousness is always completely occupied by theological considerations, to such an extent that the evidentiary value of scientific facts cannot always get a footing there, and is, consequently, pushed away into the background. One feels, in reading his writings, that, except when he is narrating facts with the pure joyfulness of a specialist exulting in the exposition of his subject (and, when in this mood, he often narrates facts with which his inferences are wholly incompatible), he never makes a point without some regard to its bearings upon theological propositions which his early training has led him to place paramount to all facts of observation whatever. In virtue of this peculiarity of disposition, Prof. Agassiz has become the welcome ally of those zealous but narrow-minded theologians, in whom the rapid progress of the Darwinian theory has awakened the easily explicable but totally groundless fear that the necessary foundations of true religion, or true Christianity, are imperilled. It is not many years since these very persons regarded Prof. Agassiz with dread and abhorrence, because of his flat contradiction of the Bible in his theory of the multiple origin of the human race. But, now that the doctrine of Evolution has come to be the unclean thing above all others to be dreaded and abhorred, this comparatively slight iniquity of Prof. Agassiz has been condoned or forgotten, and, as the great antagonist of Evolution, he is welcomed as the defender of the true Church against her foes.
This preference of theological over scientific considerations once led Prof. Agassiz (if my memory serves me rightly) to use language very unbecoming in a professed student of Nature. Some seven years ago he delivered a course of lectures at the Cooper Union, and in one of these lectures he observed that he preferred the theory which makes man out a fallen angel to the theory which makes him out an improved monkey—a remark which was quite naturally greeted with laughter and applause. But the applause was ill-bestowed, for the remark was one of the most degrading which a scientific lecturer could make. A scientific inquirer has no business to have "preferences." Such things are fit only for silly women of society, or for young children who play with facts, instead of making sober use of them. What matters it whether we are pleased with the notion of a monkey-ancestry or not? The end of scientific research is the discovery of truth, and not the satisfaction of our whims or fancies, or even of what we are pleased to call our finer feelings. The proper reason for refusing to accept any doctrine is, that it is inconsistent with observed facts, or with some other doctrine which has been firmly established on a basis of fact. The refusal to entertain a theory because it seems disagreeable or degrading, is a mark of intellectual cowardice and insincerity. In mat-
