The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 3

CHAPTER 1

THE FACT TO BE PROVED

§ 1. Evolution and Creation. § 2. The Nature of the Proof.

§ 1 Evolution and Creation

ITHERTO we have described the

forms of life, avoiding as far as possible the introduction of any controversial matter. We have now to take up aspects of our subject that have been the centres of great controversies. We have first to tell of the gradual recognition of a great reality—the Evolution of Life. And having done that as clearly and plainly as we can we shall have to discuss in the Book that follows certain theories about which opinion still varies widely and at times violently.

Now, until a century or so ago it was commonly believed that the world as we know it to-day had begun suddenly. It had been created, with man and all the species of beings as we know them to-day. Great numbers of people, including most educated people, held to the view with great tenacity. They had adjusted their moral and religious ideas to that view, and they did not realize that these ideas were not inseparably dependent upon it. All of us are prone to resist changes in our fundamental ideas. We feel instinctively that it may mean a disturbance of our way of living and the abandonment and change of objectives; it is a threat to our peace of mind and our satisfaction with our lives. The idea of the earth’s going round the sun was considered to be just as impious in its time of novelty as was the idea of Evolution by the Fundamentalist of the backward States to-day.

Then steadily and more and more abundantly came evidence to show that the existing forms of life were not all the forms of life, and that there had been a great variety of animals and plants which had passed away, a greater variety and multitude indeed than that which still exists. The science of geology became a new region of intellectual activity, and in the study of the earth’s crust the traces of a past infinitely longer than men had hitherto suspected were unfolded. Varied and wonderful as was the present spectacle of life, the series of faunas and floras that had preceded it and passed away was found to be more wonderful. Life had a past, a stupendous past. So far from it being a

thing of yesterday, the creation of a few thousand years ago, it had a history of enormous variety and infinite fascination. We can still imagine something of the excitement of our grandfathers when the fantastic and marvellous dinosaurs, the vegetation of the coal measures, the flying dragons of the Mesozoic Period were revealed to them. Continually now that once incredible catalogue is expanded. Every year the paleontologist, the seeker and student of fossils, adds fresh details to this history of living forms. Faced with these marvels the Creationist at first denied and then, no longer able to deny, declared that these extinct forms of life had been created in the past, tried out for some unknown end, to be extinguished in favour of fresh creations. They were but the prelude of these later creations. They had no clear rational relationship to living things and living things had no clear rational relationship to them. But a bolder school of interpretation appeared. These ancient forms were not so strange and incredible as they seemed. Life had produced them on its way to its present state. Generation by generation it had changed from the wonder it was to the wonder it is. ‘There had been no Creation since the beginning of life. Life had unfolded—or, to latinize unfold, it had been “ evolved ’—from some remote and very simple beginning. ~ meee What weighed with the Evolutionist in his denial of successive creations was this, that the abounding and continually accumulating record of past forms of life is not a disorderly multitude, not a confusion of inexplicable “wonders,” but that it falls into shape, it has a plan, and every fresh discovery drops into place in that plan. All of these forms fall into the scheme of a common tree of descent. That is the plan of it. If there was no other evidence to sustain it, we should still have to believe that Evolution has occurred on the strength of the plan of the fossil record alone. Let us be very clear here. We are telling the reader in this chapter that this later view is the sound one, that Evolution has occurred. But we are making no suggestion as yet as to how it has been brought about. We are simply declaring that life has come to Its

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