404 The Living Plant 



every kind of plant and of animal, with every one of its manifold 

 parts, was created substantially as it now exists at some definite 

 time in the past by the act of an omnipotent and omniscient 

 Creator. On the other hand, the doctrine of Evolution, now held 

 by all biologists and most other thinkers as well, maintains that 

 each species of plant, and each one of its structures, has been 

 derived by gradual modification from preexistent and simpler 

 kinds, which in turn were derived from yet other and still simpler 

 kinds, and so on, in an unbroken chain of descent back to very 

 ancient and very simply-organized ancestors, whose exact mode 

 of origin is still quite unknown. 



It is now a long time since it was thought needful to present in 

 biological courses or books the evidence for Evolution against 

 Special Creation, but our present-day acceptance of Evolution as 

 almost an axiomatic truth involves some danger of leaving our 

 learners in ignorance of the nature and force of the evidence 

 which has compelled its acceptance. I would dearly like to 

 present this evidence to the reader as I do to my students, but 

 the callous incompressibility of paper and type forbid; and it 

 must suffice to say that it is drawn from these several sources: — 

 from the analogy of j)lant and animal improvement hy man (soon to 

 be considered in a separate chapter on Plant Breeding), whereby 

 from simple wild forms of both animals and plants, new kinds, 

 most diverse and most wonderful, have been produced; from the 

 results of classification, which show that the kinds of plants and 

 animals fall naturally into an arrangement similar to that estab- 

 lished by relationship based upon descent among mankind, some 

 of the very same terms indeed (race, tribe, family) being used in 

 both cases; from morphology, which shows that the diverse forms 

 of special structures, — spines, tendrils, pitchers and so forth, — 

 are all modifications of simpler preexistent structures, usually 

 leaves, stems or roots; from the existence of gradations, all the 

 way up in regular steps from the very simplest kinds of plants to 

 the most complicated, with no notable gaps or missing links in 



