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The scientific renaissance brought a wealth of fresh impressions and some freedom from the tyranny of tradition, and the twofold stimulus stirred the speculative activity of a great variety of men from old Claude Duret of Moulins, of whose weird transformism (1609) Dr. Henry de Varigny[8] gives us a glimpse, to Lorenz Oken (1779-1851) whose writings are such mixtures of sense and nonsense that some regard him as a far-seeing prophet and others as a fatuous follower of intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. Similarly, for De Maillet, Maupertuis, Diderot, Bonnet, and others, we must agree with Professor Osborn that they were not actually in the main Evolution movement. Some have been included in the roll of honour on very slender evidence, Robinet for instance, whose evolutionism seems to us extremely dubious.[9] The first naturalist to give a broad and concrete expression to the evolutionist doctrine of descent was Buffon (1707-1788), but it is interesting to recall the fact that his contemporary Linnaeus (1707-1778), protagonist of the counter-doctrine of the fixity of species,[10] went the length of admitting (in 1762) that new species might arise by inter-crossing. Buffon's position among the pioneers of the evolution-doctrine is weakened by his habit of vacillating between his own conclusions and the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne, but there is no doubt that he had firm grasp of the general idea of "l'enchainment des etres."

A few hundred stellar spectra resembling this description are well known, discovered mostly at the Harvard Observatory. Their details differ greatly, but they have certain features in common. The bright lines of helium are extremely rare in stars, but they have been observed in a few stellar spectra. The bright lines of nebulium have never been observed in a true star: they and the radiations in the ultra-violet known as at 3726A, seem to be confined to the nebular state; and the absorption lines of nebulium have never been observed in any spectrum. As soon as the stellar state is reached nebulium is no longer in evidence. Stellar spectra containing bright lines seem always to include hydrogen bright lines. This is as we should expect; hydrogen is the lightest known gas, and it is probably the substance which can best exist in the outer strata of stars in general. The extensive outer strata of very young stars seem to be composed largely of hydrogen, though other elements are in some cases present, as indicated by the weaker bright lines in a few cases. This preference of hydrogen for the outermost strata is illustrated by several very interesting observations of the nebulae.

Then he walks away at once in silence, leaning on the arm of Theseus, and when at last the watchers dare to look, they see Theseus afar off, alone, screening his eyes with his hand, as if some sight too dreadful for mortal eyes had passed before him; but OEdipus is gone, and not with lamentation, but in hope and wonder. Even when Hamlet dies, and the peal of ordnance is shot off, it is to congratulate him upon his escape from unbearable woe; and that is the same in life. If our eye falls on the sad stories of men and women who have died by their own hand, how seldom do they speak in the scrawled messages they leave behind them as though they were going to silence and nothingness! It is just the other way. The unhappy fathers and mothers who, maddened by disaster, kill their children are hoping to escape with those they love best out of miseries they cannot bear; they mean to fly together, as Lot fled with his daughters from the city of the plain. The man who slays himself is not the man who hates life; he only hates the sorrow and the shame which make unbearable that life which he loves only too well. He is trying to migrate to other conditions; he desires to live, but he cannot live so. It is the imagination of man that makes him seek death; only the animal endures, but man hurries away in the hope of finding something better.

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