smiling: "We come, now, to the first appearance, so far as we know, of an animal that by reason of a superior development of its brain was destined to subjugate all the other members of the animal kingdom—the animal which we know as Man." And Donald had been facing the picture of his own infinite littleness in the mighty scheme of a universe which had existed so many ages before the first appearance of that prehistoric animal, the first Man, and which would exist when all the inhabitants of the modern world were fossil remains to an endless future of geologists.
In his later years he was to consider that this same brave Science had once taught confidently that the stars were set in crystal spheres revolving tunefully about the earth, that it had prescribed dissolved pearls as a medicine, and believed the liver to be the seat of love. But now he saw only that his teachers had led him to confront a terrible query—a query which for days he had been afraid to face. If it were true that Man was only an animal of a superior development of brain, and if all animals died the everlasting death?
In the hope of finding an answer to that query, he had been reading hungrily and in the large. Now he was gulping the conclusions of a materialist who had just said the last word on Science and Immortality; and the book had led him to the plain edge of the depths for which he had hoped it would find him a bridge— and had left him standing there.
When he looked up from the final page of the
