CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



more the endless round of scouring, carrying, and depositing. 

 When the crustal movement is so profound as to be dignified 

 by the name revolution there may be marked organic change, 

 stimulated usually by stress of climate, which, either directly 

 or indirectly, has a vast influence upon life. These times of 

 change are therefore critical, both in the elimination of old 

 types and in the acceleration of the evolution of persistent 

 types, so that the whole aspect of nature as revealed by the 

 fossils is profoundly altered. It is not at all surprising, there- 

 fore, that the older naturalists, whose orthodoxy caused them 

 to adhere to the doctrine of special creation, imagined a suc- 

 cession of great catastrophes, by which the older faunas were 

 completely destroyed and life was recreated twenty-seven 

 times, the number chosen corresponding to the greater divi- 

 sions of geologic time. This same explanation was appli- 

 cable locally to the lesser breaks in the record. But geologists 

 are now convinced of the uniformity of physical conditions 

 throughout geologic time and of the all-sufficiency of the 

 observable phenomena of the present world — of changes in 

 temperature, of rain, snow, and ice, of erosion and geochem- 

 ical action, of earthquakes and volcanic activity — to account 

 for any and all of the changes, however great their apparent 

 magnitude, in the geologic past. And as a necessary corol- 

 lary of this doctrine of uniformitarianism in the physical 

 world comes that of continuity with evolutionary change in 

 the organic world. That the evidence for this organic con- 

 tinuity seems meagre is due in part to our lack of perspective, 

 in part to our prepossession with false conceptions or pseudo- 

 conceptions, and in part to our proneness to magnify imper- 

 fections that merely mar but do not destroy a most magnifi- 

 cent, clearly unified, and deeply impressive moving spectacle 

 of creation, which at length makes Man the heir of all the 

 ages. 



[268] 



