CHAPTER II. 



DARWINISM AND EVOLUTION DEFINED AND 



DISTINGUISHED. 



OUR manuals of zoology and botany contain the names 



and descriptions of about 400,000 living species of animals 



and 200,000 living species of plants. There are 



Possible parts of the earth from which we have collected 



modes of origin r i J r i A 1 



of diverse plant as yet only a few kinds of animals and plants, 

 and animal merely the larger, more conspicuous or more 

 abundant kinds ; there are no parts of the earth 

 from which we are not constantly receiving reports of the 

 discovery of "new" species new, of course, simply in the 

 sense that we have not known them before. It is wholly 

 certain that the number of different species, that is, kinds, 

 of living organisms must number millions ; various guesses, 1 

 all unimportant, have been made. Of the extinct species, 

 those hosts of strange denizens of our changing earth in the 

 ages gone, the number of recorded forms can at best be but 

 the veriest fraction of the grand total of species that have 

 actually existed. Now all these millions of kinds of animals 

 and plants can have had an origin in some one of but three 

 ways ; they have come into existence spontaneously, they 

 have been specially created by some supernatural power, or 

 they have descended one from the other in many-branching 

 series by gradual transformation. There is absolutely no 

 scientific evidence for either of the first two ways ; there is 

 much scientific evidence for the last way. There is left for 

 the scientific man, then, solely the last; that is, the method 



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