CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



logical guess is called a hypothesis, from a Greek work that 

 means supposition or "guess". The next step, of course, is 

 to try to prove the correctness or incorrectness of the hypo- 

 thesis. This may be done by reasoning out what conse- 

 quences ought to follow // the hypothesis is correct, and then 

 making further investigation to ascertain whether such con- 

 sequences do follow in reality. If the hypothesis is found 

 untenable it is abandoned. As Huxley once pointed out, 

 the pathway of the history of science is strewn with aban- 

 doned hypotheses. 



If a hypothesis is found to be valid, if the consequences 

 postulated are realized in fact, then the hypothesis comes to 

 be called a theory. A theory is a hypothesis that has been 

 found to be in harmony with all the known facts, or with a 

 vast majority of those facts. Eventually the conception called 

 a theory may no longer be regarded as a theory but may be 

 considered an actual jact or truth. Thus, our conception of 

 matter as composed of atoms was at first a hypothesis ; all that 

 we knew suggested that idea. After undergoing rigid tests 

 the atomic hypothesis became the atomic theory. Now we 

 have, so to speak, handled atoms, and separated them into 

 their component parts, so that atoms are no longer regarded 

 as hypothetical or theoretical things but as actual facts. 



So with the conception of the evolution of living things 

 from earlier, simpler organisms to those now living. The 

 idea was first a hypothesis, then a theory; and probably no 

 living student of plants now doubts that evolution is a fact 

 — that is, he believes that the present condition of the king- 

 doms of plants and of animals was attained by the process 

 of evolution. 



In the evolution of the plant kingdom the evidence avail- 

 able forces us to conclude that the earliest organisms were 

 protein compounds endowed with these peculiar attributes: 



[144] 



