CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



due less to Milton than to the faith of his fellow Puritans 

 in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. 



The formal definition or establishment of species was prac- 

 tically begun by Milton's contemporary, John Ray, an Essex 

 naturalist (1627-1705) . Ray founded many of the species of 

 the British flora and prepared the way for Linnaeus (1707- 

 1778), whose system was based upon implicit faith in the 

 immutability or fixity of species. Linnaeus declared, in a 

 famous dictum, that "the number of species is as many as 

 different forms were created at the beginning." In the fol- 

 lowing century Cuvier was equally positive. He believed 

 that species are as distinct as the different makes of boots 

 sent out from a factory. Darwin, on the contrary, called his 

 epoch-making treatise "The Origin of Species," because he 

 maintained that species pass into one another; and the doc- 

 trine that one species may be derived from an earlier allied 

 species is the doctrine of organic evolution. He regarded 

 the term species as one arbitrarily given, for convenience of 

 designation, to a set of individuals closely resembling one 

 another — as a term not essentially different from the term 

 variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating 

 forms. 



Darwin's theory was opposed to preconceived opinion. 

 The species of the more highly organized animals and plants 

 appear to be sharply separated. The differences between the 

 African and Asiatic rhinoceros, between the African and the 

 Indian elephant, between the one-humped and the two- 

 humped camel, appear to be constant and absolute. Never- 

 theless, when such animals are examined carefully it is found 

 that individuals in different herds of each kind show slight 

 but significant differences. The giraffes, which were at first 

 classified as one species, have been broken up into eleven sub- 

 species; the African elephant has been found to include more 



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