94 THE PLANT WORLD. 



OF INTEREST TO TEACHERS. 



Edited by Dr. C. Stl'art Gager. 



" Collapse of Enolution." — The above caption is the title of 

 an address, dehvered under the auspices of the American Bible 

 League, in Boston, in December, 1904, by Professor L. T. Town- 

 send, Emeritus Professor in Boston University. 



Professor Townsend quotes from an unnamed Cornell professor 

 the statement that attacks upon the fact of evolution " are made 

 only by persons who are not familiar with either the evolution 

 hypothesis or the facts of natural history," and, " are made for the 

 purpose of bolstering up dogmas and beliefs." The address under 

 discussion is one of the strongest evidences of the truth of these 

 quotations that has appeared in recent years. 



An idea of the author's comprehension of what evolution is, 

 and especially of his acquaintance with standard literature of 

 biology may be inferred by his statements that the terms germ- 

 plasm and protoplasm (sic) have not for five or ten years "been 

 employed seriously by any reputable writer on these subjects " 

 (p. 12) ; that evolutionists should be able to show a chain with no 

 missing links (p. 15) ; that species should generally improve and 

 primitive forms die out (pp. 16, 17, 19) ; that evolution means 

 that one species transforms "into another" (pp. 21. 29); that 

 evolution demands the existence of " millions of intermediate 

 forms" (p. 23); that DeVries "appears to have developed a 

 mutable species of primrose," but that, on the contrary, nothing 

 has been accomplished outside of " an oscillation around a primi- 

 tive center " (p. 28) ; that De Vries is a believer in special crea- 

 tion (p. 52) ; that, " There is no evidence whatever of a tendency 

 in nature towards the transmutation of species " (p. 28) ; that, if 

 evolution were true, " classification would be out of the question," 

 but " the scientist is not embarrassed by any such perplexing con- 

 ditions " as a difficulty in classification (p. 29) ; and, finally, that 

 the theory of evolution " is discredited and abandoned by the best 

 scholarship of the world." The same writer is the author of a 

 volume entitled, " Evolution or Creation." 



