Introduction xiii 



tipodes get along upside-down. Those already accustomed to 

 certain notions regarding the nature and origin of the earth 

 and its inhabitants would find it equally difficult to consider 

 a radically new statement, such as the evolutionary hypothe- 

 sis, and to make it fit into past experiences and thinking. 

 Quite aside from the several accounts found in Genesis, the 

 folklore and common assumptions of many peoples take for 

 granted the existence of plant and animal forms as distinct 

 species, in the sense that each derives from its own ancestors 

 independently of others. Linnseus himself, the Swedish 

 naturalist who in the Eighteenth Century laid the foun- 

 dation for the scientific classification of living things, and 

 who devised the binomial system for naming species, con- 

 sidered the different forms as absolutely independent units. 

 He declared that the number of species in the world is 

 as many as the number of different forms created in the be- 

 ginning. 



The doctrine of special creation, that is, the creation of 

 " a pair " of each kind of plant and animal as the ancestors 

 of all succeeding life forms, was not a part of orthodox 

 teaching. This assumption, with the corollary that each line 

 of descendants remains specifically true to form and dis- 

 tinct from all other species, was, in fact, an open and explicit 

 contradiction of the teachings of Saint Augustine, who in 

 turn had apparently been influenced by the teachings of 

 Aristotle. It was only in the Sixteenth Century, under the 

 influence of the Spanish theologian Suarez, that any system- 

 atic attempt was made by the church authorities to formu- 

 late a doctrine regarding the origin of the living world in 

 harmony with the stories presented in Genesis. This con- 

 tributed a great deal to the destructive and confusing hostility 

 between science and theology for generations to come. Pro- 

 fessor Osborn writes, " if the orthodoxy of Augustine had 

 remained the teachings of the Catholic Church, the final 

 establishment of [the doctrine of] evolution would have 

 come far earlier than it did, certainly during the Eighteenth 

 Century instead of the Nineteenth Century, and the bitter 



