This work is a solidification of some new matter with the substance of the ten Morse Lectures delivered at Union Theological Seminary in the spring of 1895. Professor Tyler aims to trace the development of man from the simple living substance to his position at present, paying attention to incidental facts merely as incidental and contributory. He keeps always in view the successive accomplishments of life as they appear in the person of accepted general truth, rather than in the guise of the facts of progress.
He begins by saying: "We take for granted the probable truth of the theory of evolution as stated by Mr. Darwin, and that it applies to man as really as to any lower animal." He assumes that an acceptable historian of biology must possess a genealogical tree of the animal kingdom, and adds that a knowledge of the sequence of dominant functions or "physiological dynasties," is quite as necessary to his inquiry as a history of the development of anatomical details. Since the germs of the future are always concealed in the history of the present, he claims that "if we can trace this sequence of dominant functions, whose evolution has filled past ages, we can safely foretell something, at least, of man's future development."
The possibility of making false trails, at times, should not deter the investigator; for what he would establish is not the history of a single human race, nor of the movements of a century, but an understanding of the development of animal life through ages. "And only," says Professor Tyler, "when we have a biological history can we have any satisfactory conception of environment." The book concludes with a brief notice of the modern theories of heredity and variation advanced by Nageli and Weismann.
The Morse Lectures for 1894
THE RELIGIONS OF JAPAN
FROM THE DAWN OF HISTORY TO THE
ERA OF THE MÉIJI
By WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS, D.D.
Formerly of the Imperial University of Tokio;
Author of "The Mikado's Empire" and "Corea, the Hermit Nation"