^22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the necessary natural lines of their gourd originals. Each village 

 has its own distinctive patterns. I have a small collection of 

 native Kabyle and Morocco pottery, and in every piece without 

 exception one can see at once the particular sort of gourd — double, 

 single, or flat-faced — on which each individual vase must be finally 

 affiliated. And, when once one has learned to know and recognize 

 these central types, the character of the ornamentation on more 

 advanced keramic products of other nations often enables one to 

 guess correctly from what original natural form the particular 

 piece in question is ultimately descended. I believe it would be 

 possible so to arrange all the keramic products in a great museum, 

 along a series of divergent radial lines from certain fixed centers, 

 that the common origin of all from each special sort of gourd or 

 calabash would become immediately obvious to the most casual 

 observer. 



DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. 



III. 



WE come now to that which most people feel to be the real 

 difficulty in the way of accepting Darwinism. No well-in- 

 structed churchman supposes that the faith of Christ stands or 

 falls with the theory of special creations, or that the existence of 

 God is less certain because we have learned that the witness of 

 conscience is necessary to interpret the witness of Nature, and 

 that physical science by itself can tell us less than we thought 

 about the personality and the love of God. 



4. But Darwinism means a great deal more than the substitu- 

 tion of derivation for special creation, or of the new teleology for 

 the old argument from design. It means a new view of man, and 

 his place in creation. Darwin foresaw this from the first, and in 

 the "Origin of Species" asserted his belief that "much light 

 will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."* Now, 

 if this had only meant a chemical analysis of " the dust of the 

 ground " out of which man was formed, if, like Matthew Henry, 

 Darwin had assured us — on grounds for which, indeed, no evidence 

 is given— that the dust was " not gold dust, powder of pearl, dia- 

 mond dust, but common dust: dust of the ground"; "not dry 

 dust, but dust wetted with the mist which went up from the 

 earth," it is clear religion would have felt that it had lost as little 

 as science would have gained. But Darwin's theory connected 

 man with the higher vertebrata by analogies as strong as those 

 which made other species descendants from a common stock. 

 This was the secret of the opposition to the " Origin of Species." 



* P. 428. 



