Evolutionist Conclusion 95 



the degree of relationship with the different main 

 groups of apes can be determined beyond possibility 

 of mistake." 



Speaking of blood reminds us of the striking corre- 

 spondence between the proportions of the salts in 

 our blood or any backboned animal's blood and the 

 proportions of the same salts in the sea; especially, 

 they say, the ancient Silurian sea in which the primi- 

 tive fishes lived and had their blood well established. 

 This looks like the past living on in the present ! 



§11. General Conclusion. 



Considerations such as we have illustrated have led 

 naturalists to accept evolution as a modal theory of 

 racial becoming. It means little more than projecting 

 on Animate Nature the idea of human history. 



Continuity, however, is an essential part of the 

 idea — a continuity of natural processes. Our present- 

 day fauna and flora and their inter-relations have 

 arisen without gaps, though not without leaps, from 

 simpler antecedents which were their entire pre- 

 conditions. There can be no dragging in of spiritual 

 influxes to help the evolving organism over difficult 

 stiles. It is a religious conclusion that a spiritual 

 background is always there, and to that conclusion 

 science can have nothing to say. But what is scien- 

 tifically intolerable is the suggestion that the spiritual 

 background is intermittently intrusive in the chain of 

 natural events. 



Organic evolution may be defined as a continuous 

 natural process of racial change in a definite direc- 



