The Meaning of Evolution

Appendix 299

A FOREWORD

Before my window lies an enchanting landscape. It embraces a stretch of open rolling country, beautiful as the eye could wish to rest upon. The sun with its slanting rays is not giving it heat enough in these winter months to make it blossom in its radiant beauty, but the mind goes easily back through the few brown months to the time when the field not far away was waving with its rich yellow grain so soon to be food for those who planted it. Beyond this field lies an orchard where, in regular and orderly rows, stand the apple trees whose bright blossoms in the spring make the landscape so beautiful and whose fruit in the fall serves so richly for our enjoyment. A little farther on, a pasture is filled with sleek-coated cows, feeding quietly and patiently until the evening when they will return to their stalls to yield their rich milk. Still farther on lies a tract of forest. The varied shades of the beeches, the tulip poplars and the chestnuts make an exquisite contrast and give to the landscape its attractive background framed in by a distant hill. Behind this hill flows a mighty river carrying on its breast the ships by which we share the over-abundance of our own blessings with our brothers on the other side of the sea, from whom in turn we receive of their overplus. Beyond this teeming river lies a level stretch of fertile land and then the mighty ocean. On one side of the scene runs a busy highway. Along this men pass and repass, some on foot, others drawn by their patient and submissive horses. Still others are carried by the new-found power of the sunshine imprisoned beneath the rocks in the oil that has been forming ever since the sun shone down upon the great forests of the far distant past.

In a pathway to one side, some children are playing. One of them has laid upon the ground a rectangle of stones divided into four and her little mind sees before her the house which is teaching her to get ready for the work that shall come to her in later life. Meanwhile her short-haired companion is prancing around astride a stick; he too, little as he suspects it, is getting ready for life.

It needs little reflection to realize that the scene has not always been what it is. The underlying ground has surely been there longest, its age vying only with that of the bounding ocean that beats upon the shore and works the sand into fantastic stretches. The forest has been there long and so has the stream; the road perhaps ranks next in age; then come the orchard trees, and most recent of all the waving grain. People come and go but form no stable part of this landscape. We know how the grain came to be there, and we understand the orderly arrangement of the orchard trees; the road too we can explain. How came the stream there, and how the forest trees? Have they always been there, or did they too have a beginning? Was there a time when there was no ocean? When was this time? How came they there?

When the lisping lips of my young child asked me, "Papa, who made me?" I told him "God," and he knew enough and was content with his knowledge. After a while he grew older and his inquisitive spirit began to puzzle with the question of how God had made him. When his growing mind was ready for the new knowledge I took him to my side and told him the great mystery of life. I told him how he owed to his father and to his mother the beginnings of his life, how God gave him to us. Now a new era opened in his childish mind. As he grows on to greater maturity he cannot help wondering how the first man was made, how the trees, and the world came to be. He is no longer satisfied with the simple statement that God made them. His eager mind wants to know, if may be, how God made them.

So, in the distant past, in the childhood of our race, the question was asked, "Who made us?" and the answer was "God." Men formed their simple conception at that time of how He did it. As the centuries rolled by and the children of men have learned from creation the story of its origin a riper and richer knowledge has given them a broader and finer conception. No less does the reverent student believe that God created the earth, but he no longer thinks of God as working, as man works. He no longer feels that it is impious to attempt to read God's plan in His work; to see how this work has arisen, to see, if may be, what there is ahead.

This is one of the tasks to which science is now giving itself. The answer is uncertain and halting. A few things seem clear; others seem to be nearly certain; of still others we can only say that for the present we must be content with the knowledge we have. But if we take the best we have and work over it thoughtfully and carefully, the better will slowly come, and in time we shall know far more than we now suspect. Meanwhile, it is the attempt of this book to give to people whose training is other than scientific some conception of this great story of creation. Without dogmatic certainty but without indecision it tries to tell what modern science thinks as to the great problems of life. It tries to describe the possible origin of animals and plants, their slow advance, the length of their steady uplift, the forces that brought it about. It tries to tell a little of the men who have helped to develop the great idea of evolution, of the great men who persuaded the scientific world of its truth, and of the later minds that are modifying and enlarging the idea of the master evolutionist. It tries to tell what science perhaps vaguely hopes as to the future. What are we to be? Can we help the great advance?

The Meaning of Evolution

CHAPTER I. Evolution Before Darwin

EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN

Ever since men have been able to think they must have puzzled out for themselves some way of accounting for their own beginnings. Every savage tribe with whom we have any intimate acquaintance has some story that accounts for the origin of the tribe at least, and often for the beginning of the world. These stories are handed down from generation to generation and are scarcely questioned in the thought of most men. In early Greece there was a succession of men whom the world calls philosophers. These men thought earnestly and deeply on all kinds of questions. Their method was not our method. The plan of making a long series of observations, before coming to any conclusion, was not the habit of their minds. They reasoned out on general principles what seemed to them must have been the origin of the world. It is not strange that among these should come, now and then, some one who in some passage or other should show that there had come to his mind at least a glimmer of the thought that was later to develop into the great idea which the modern world calls evolution.

Among the earliest of these was Anaximander, who lived 600 years before Christ. He thought that the earth was at first a fluid. Gradually this fluid began to dry and grow thicker, and here and there, where it thickened most, dry land appeared. When this dry land had become firm enough to serve as his home, man came up from the water in the form of a fish. Slowly and gradually the fish, struggling about on the land, gained for himself the limbs and members he needed for his new situation and developed into a man. After him other animals came up in much the same fashion, then the plants, until the whole world was clothed with its present inhabitants.

One hundred and fifty years later Empedocles announced a new thought. He said that in the beginnings there were all sorts of strange, incomplete, and misjointed monsters which swarmed upon the earth, having sprung up out of the earth itself. Each was a chaos of the limbs which afterward were to belong to other animals which needed them more. Slowly and gradually an interchanging came about by which appropriate limbs fastened themselves to the proper animals. The last of these misjointed creatures is the one known as the centaur, half-man--half-horse. After a while, when all the members had found their proper places, the animals were complete. In one respect this opinion foreshadowed our later idea. It suggested that the more perfect animals had arisen out of the less perfect and that the change came gradually.

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