THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



ing the bones of some wretched, filthy being which 

 could not be called a monkey and which no one would 

 be willing to call a man. It is, perhaps, an odd fact 

 that the ancestors of animals are presented to us by 

 evolutionists as other animals well fitted to thrive in 

 their environment and adapted to enjoy life; only in 

 the case of man, do we get the picture of inefficiency, 

 half man, half monkey, which is indecent and de- 



graded. 



Without an extensive palaeontological record to 

 direct our attention to the possibility of evolution 

 which is supported by the experiments and observa- 

 tions of biologists in other fields of work, it seems 

 evident that evolution might have been proposed as a 

 guess and have been developed by fancy, but that it 

 would never have been advanced as a scientific hy- 

 pothesis or theory. And certainly, we never could 

 have imagined a method of evolution such as natural 

 selection or the inheritance of acquired traits. With- 

 out such a palaeontological record our only sources 

 of proof would have rested on our reluctance to ac- 

 cept the special creation of each species by a divine 

 Creator ; on the fact that species are so numerous and 

 so complex that we cannot classify them; on the fact 

 that we can cause animals and plants to vary by se- 

 lective breeding; and lastly, because we have found 

 that an embryo goes through a series of structural 

 changes which apparently connects different species. 

 The first source is purely a matter of temperament, as 



C 120 ] 



