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200 C. F. Adams little value, — not much more than the biography of the average in- dividual ; it is a record of small accomplishment, — in many instances a record of no accomplishment at all, perhaps of retrogression ; — for we cannot all be successful, nor even everlastingly and effect- ively strenuous. Among nations in history, as among men we know, the commonplace is the rule ; but, whether ordinary or exceptional, — conspicuous or obscure, — each has its proper place, and to it that place should be assigned. Having laid down this principle, I, eighteen months ago, pro- ceeded to apply it to the society I was then addressing, and to the history of the commonwealth whose name that society bears ; and I gave my answer to it, such as that answer was. The same ques- tion I now put as concerns Wisconsin ; and to that also I propose to venture an answer. As my text has indicated, that answer, also, will not, in a sense, be lacking in ambition. In the history of Wis- consin I shall seek to find verification of what Darwin suggested, — evidence of the truth of the great law of natural selection as applied also to man. Thus stated, the theme is a large one, and may be approached in many ways ; and, in the first place, I propose to approach it in the way usual with modern historical writers. I shall attempt to assign to Wisconsin its place in the sequence of recent develop- ment ; for it is only during the last fifty years that Wisconsin has exercised any, even the most imperceptible, influence on what is conventionally agreed upon as history'. That this region before the year 1 848 had an existence, we know ; as we also know that, since the last glacial period when the earth's surface hereabouts assumed its present geographical form, — some five thousand, or, perhaps, ten, or even twenty thousand years ago, — it has been occu- pied by human beings, — fire-making, implement-using, garment- wearing, habitation-dwelling. With these we have now nothing to do. We, the historians, are concerned only with what may be called the mere fringe of Time's raiment, — the last half-century of the fifty or one hundred centuries ; the rest belong to the eth- nologist and the geologist, not to us. But the last fifty years, again, so far as the evolution of man from a lower to a higher stage of development is concerned, though a very quickening period, has, after all, been but one stage, and not the final stage, of a distinct phase of development. That phase has now required" four centuries in which to work itself out to the point as yet reached ; for it harks back to the discovery of America, and the movement towards reli- gious freedom which followed close upon that discover)', though having no direct connection with it. Martin Luther and Christo-