ESSAYS 



PROM MYTH TO SCIENCE (Joshua C. Gregory, B.Sc). 



There is a familiar story of a countryman visiting the Zoo for the first time. 

 After staring at the giraffe in astonishment mingled with horror, he exclaimed, 

 " Tliere ain't no such animal ! " We can hardly sympathise with tliis country- 

 man over the giraffe, which is too familiar to be doubted, but we are staggered 

 from time to time when science draws for us a new portrait of some pre- 

 historic creature. We feel occasionally, in a gallery of prehistoric monsters, 

 like the countryman at the Zoo. Polite incredulity, at the least, seems most 

 fitting when a creature more than forty feet long, even if its length is mostly 

 neck and tail, is said to have behaved like a hen and laid eggs. If we were 

 removed to a desert island where only men lived, deprived of our memory 

 of all other members of the great community of life and then suddenly 

 introduced into Noah's ark, we would shrink in terrified horror from a world 

 so apparently alien to our own. The extraordinary diversity of animal 

 species, even now, when familiarity momentarily disappears in contemplative 

 reflection, suggests a mingling of many worlds instead of a world which is 

 really one. If we could see, in succession and for the first time, a jelly-fish, 

 a sea-urchin, a lobster, a tortoise, an eagle, a shark, a giraffe, a butterfly, a 

 whale, an ant, an armadillo, an elephant, and many others, we should agree 

 with the old opinion that each species was specially and separately created, 

 and add that many different worlds must have been shuffled together. 



Yet the world of life, with all its diversities, is one family. The doctrine 

 of transformism, the doctrine that all species have grown out of other species, 

 is too well grounded to be refused. Mr. Balfour, in a presidential address 

 to the British Association, spoke of the aesthetic thrill which the insight of 

 science into the unities of the universe often bestows upon us. The concept 

 of evolution, of transformism, the affirmation that one continuous process 

 of development has produced the myriad forms of life gives such an aesthetic 

 thrill as we realise that all the infinitely varied creatures around us are united 

 as the roots, trunk, branches, and foliage of a tree are united. Thomas 

 Fuller found in the genealogy of his Saviour that " Rehoboam begat Abiam ; 

 that is, a bad father begat a bad son. Abiam begat Asa ; that is, a bad 

 father a good son. Asa begat Jehosaphat ; that is, a good father a good son. 

 Jehosaphat begat Joram ; that is, a good father a bad son." One fundamental 

 plan, one common relation of parentage, ran through many different situa- 

 tions. So in the world of fife many species, at first sight so diverse as to belong 

 to different worlds, are manifestations of one fundamental plan. 



The world of the human mind, when surveyed as the various animal 

 species are surveyed in a museum, produces the same impression of a 

 bewildering collection of beings brought into a world to which they do not 

 really belong. " The phenomena which early societies present us with 

 are not easy at first to understand," remarks Maine, because they are so 

 strange and uncouth.^ The beliefs and practices of our primitive forefathers, 



1 Ancient Law, 4th ed., pp. 119-20. 

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