be unfair to judge by a syllabus, in which all the explanations have been left out and all the hard words left in, it would seem a misnomer to call elementary a course of lectures of which the topics range over so wide a field. Fifty-eight lectures cover not only the whole field of biology, but discuss incidentally some of the most fundamental and disputed questions of metaphysics, ethics, sociology, religion, and even of politics and deportment. Now, as no man can profess to be an authority on all these—and this is recognized in President Jordan's own practice of frequently inserting lectures by specialists into his course—it stands to reason that what is elementary for some of those addressed will be very hard for others. And in any case the vast extent of the subjects treated hardly leaves a possibility of making them elementary, by fullness of explanation, within the time-limits of a lecture. But, presumably, the course will be all the more stimulating for not being very elementary, and it certainly shows what a fine instrument of general culture such scientific topics can be made. This, however, is largely due to the fact that President Jordan does not scorn to make the dry bones of scientific detail live and glow in the enchanting atmosphere of speculation. And it is just the abundance of speculation in everything connected with and dependent on Evolution that makes the subject so popular and attractive. President Jordan does not seem quite to realize this, and so treats philosophers to the reprimands which are so common in the mouth of a science which thinks it is "not advanced by speculative philosophy, or by philosophic meditation." If that were true, the outlook for Evolution would indeed be a gloomy one. For it is honeycombed with speculative assumptions—as much in President Jordan's interpretation as in any other.
Let us examine, e.g., the account he gives of Evolution in his first two lectures. He says Evolution is, I, a science, II, a theory, and III, a method of study. Ill is simply a vindication of the Historical method.
As to I, he defines it as "the study of changing beings as affected by unchanging laws," and as "seeing the objects in nature (1) as they appear, (2) as they really are, (3) as they were, (4) as they are, their present condition being an inevitable result of what they were, the laws of their being leading on to what they are to be."
There is enough here to occupy a philosophic defender of President Jordan's assumptions for half a lifetime. To indicate only a few of the philosophic problems he so unwittingly raises, (1) the definition is no more applicable to Evolution than to any other science.
