THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



guess or by an acute perception of relationship of 

 form, agrees with the succession according to modern 

 evolutionists. There is first the appearance of land 

 and water; then follow in order the vegetable world, 

 fish, birds, land animals, and lastly man. 



The Judaic author is an unqualified pluralist in his 

 separation of the organic from the inorganic, and the 

 former has in addition a spiritual nature. It is custom- 

 ary for the rationalist to sneer at the crudeness of this 

 conception of the creation, but if it had not been 

 forced upon him as a literal statement of fact and 

 had not been used as the chief argument against evo- 

 lution, the criticism would be puerile ;.especially so, if 

 the creation according to Empedocles is held to con- 

 tain the germ of transmutation. There is, indeed, 

 little to choose between these two accounts as ration- 

 al ideas, for they both are the imaginative guesses of 

 unscientific minds, except that Empedocles is gro- 

 tesque and the Biblical account is not. The real dif- 

 ference between the two lies in the fact that the Greek 

 legend does not specify time, while the Jewish chron- 

 icle states that the creation was a matter of six days 

 and then gives a list of patriarchs and their genealo- 

 gy. From these tables attempts were early made to 

 fix the exact date of the creation ; the accepted date of 

 4004 B.C. was finally calculated by Bishop Ussher in 

 the seventeenth century. The method of determining 

 this date was the same as that used by geologists to 

 determine the length of geological periods and the 



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