CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



gen, and nitrogen bathed in light, heat, water, and air. So 

 we all admit. But all life, so far as we know, starts from 

 life, and every living being had some sort of living ancestry, 

 moulded by the shifting and sifting of environment. 



As to the origin of life on the earth we know nothing 

 whatever. Speculation about it is more or less futile; indeed 

 it may be mischievous, as when some particular unproved 

 suggestion serves as a basis for further philosophical expan- 

 sion. Science must stop where the facts stop, or thereabout, 

 the limit of "thereabout" covering all legitimate diversions 

 and excursions of philosophy. 



Volumes have been devoted to the evidence of evolution, 

 but their value depends on no single fact nor on hundreds 

 of facts. The inevitable conclusion is that all the facts point 

 the same way. All the evidence, whether drawn from com- 

 parative anatomy, embryology, physiology, or geographical 

 distribution, from human institutions or from human his- 

 tory, brings us to the same result. All of it deals with the 

 same truth as seen from a thousand different sides. All life 

 has its roots in the past and its fruitage in the future. We 

 must view the millions of kinds of living beings not as dis- 

 connected entities resulting from disconnected acts of crea- 

 tion, but as divergent twigs from the great parent tree of 

 life. In a large sense, there is, as Parker observes, "only one 

 kind of life in our world." 



"What we mean by life is protoplasmic organization. Just 

 what this is, we do not know. ... It is continuous and has 

 been continuous since the remote past and will continue 

 indefinitely in the future. Vitality is the activity of the 

 organization. Death is not of necessity the cessation of 

 vitality; death occurs only with the disintegration of the 

 machine. When this occurs with any single organism acting 

 as trustee for the specific organization, there are myriads of 



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