It may be taken for granted that every one here has a general notion of what is meant by the scientific doctrine of Evolution. But probably not every one has learned how comprehensive and far reaching, as a theory of the universe, that doctrine is. Evolution undertakes to account for the origin not merely of man, but of all animal page 2 organisms, of all terrestrial life, animal and vegetable, of the planet itself, of the solar system of which it is a member, of other systems, the central luminaries of which are known to us only as fixed stars; in short, of the physical universe. It runs back the ancestry of animal forms till their root is indistinguishable from Out of vegetal life. It finds the beginnings of both, according to some of its exponents, in what is called the "primordial slime"—the Urschleim of German evolutionists—an albuminous substance existing in deep sea bottoms, which is said to be alive. "This living slime, "says a German writer,^* "the so-called Bathybius, does not even exhibit individuality, or the definiteness of a separate existence; it resembles the shapeless mineral substances, each particle of which bears the characteristics of the whole." The origin of the planet and of the solar system it refers to the condensation of diffused nebulous matter, such as is now discernible in various parts of the stellar universe. We have a compendious statement of the doctrine of Evolution in Tennyson's "Princess:"

This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till toward the centre set the starry tides,
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast
The planets; then the monster, then the man
Tattooed or wended, winter-clad in skins,
Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate,
As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here
Amongst the lowest.