6 INTRODUCTION TO EVOLUTION 



ters, while expressing important religious truth concerning the Creator, 

 should not be regarded as literal history. Unfortunately, both for religion 

 and for science, the leadership of these men was but little followed. 



The controversy which climaxed after the appearance of Darwin's Origin 

 of Species has now largely subsided. For the most part the churches recog- 

 nize evolution as the means by which the Creator works. Some portions of 

 Protestant denominations, commonly called "fundamentalist," still deny 

 the truth of evolution. There are fundamentalists in the Roman Catholic 

 Church also. But that church does not officially oppose evolution, even 

 of man, so long as no attempt is made to explain the origin of the human 

 soul by this means. This is a restriction readily accepted by the present 

 author since in his opinion the soul does not come within the province of 

 science (see p. 219). 



Plan of the Book 



Evolution manifests itself in varied aspects of the living world — in struc- 

 ture, in chemical composition, in nature of life processes (metabolism), in 

 embryonic development, in chemical nature of blood, in the manner in 

 which animals are distributed over the earth and adapted to diflfering en- 

 vironments, in the classification of animals, in the remains of prehistoric 

 animals preserved to us as fossils. In the next chapter we shall summarize 

 some ideas of the nature and causes of evolutionary change, ideas which 

 will be of use to us in understanding the varied manifestations of evolu- 

 tion. Then we shall consider the factual contributions to study of evolu- 

 tion made by various fields of biology. Finally, in Chapters 15-21 we 

 shall discuss in more detail the means and methods by which evolutionary 

 change occurs. 



References and Suggested Readings 



Darwin, C. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 1859. Modern 



Library series, Random House, New York; or Mentor Book MT294, New 



American Library, New York. 

 Locy, W. A. Biology and Its Makers. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1915. 

 Locy, W. A. Growth of Biology. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1925. 

 Nordenskiold, E. The History of Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 



1928. 

 Osborn, H. F. Frotn the Greeks to Darwin, 2nd ed. New York: The Macmillan 



Company, 1896. 



