CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



birds, because they lie in the track of storms, and every year 

 birds are arriving from the mainland in such numbers as to 

 prevent the isolation of groups of them and the development 

 of new types. This must not be understood to mean that 

 new species do not arise on the continents; it merely means 

 that they develop more rapidly under favourable isolation. 



Islands like the Hawaiian group or St. Helena, which 

 are very remote from any land and are of considerable geo- 

 logical antiquity, have birds and other land creatures so 

 peculiar that their ancestry is obscure, or even unknown, so 

 that it is difficult to decide what continent their ancestors 

 really came from. This relation between the peculiarity of 

 its species and the remoteness and antiquity of an island is 

 just what we should expect according to the theory of evolu- 

 tion, but these factors should have no effect according to the 

 theory of special creation. 



An interesting illustration of this principle is afforded by 

 the rails (RaUidae) , a family of birds that is distributed all 

 over the world, on continents and islands, except in the polar 

 regions. The continental species can fly; many of the insular 

 ones cannot. As the islands on which these flightless birds 

 are found were never connected with any mainland, the 

 advocate of the theory of special creation must hold that the 

 birds were separately created on each island or reached it by 

 crossing the sea; but they could not cross ^he sea by swim- 

 ming, for no bird is able to swim across such breadths of sea. 

 The birds must therefore have reached the islands by flying 

 and have lost the power of flight after they settled in their 

 insular homes. This loss of flight involves so great a modi- 

 fication of structure that the birds are assigned to new species 

 and even to new genera, different from those to which their 

 flying ancestors belonged. There is no doubt a close rela- 

 tion ber^^een the loss of the power of flight and a small, 



[98] 



