CHAPTER IV 



CONCEALING AND REVEALING COLORATION AND THEIR 

 RELATION TO NATURAL SELECTION 



Inevitably any great scientific discovery contains, 

 when first promulgated, some error; and equally inevitably 

 some of the followers of any great leader of thought tend 

 to push or twist his doctrines into fantastic extremes, and 

 then to turn his thought into a system of fossilized rigidity. 

 This happened to Plato and Aristotle; and it has happened 

 to Darwin. The real work that Darwin did was in con- 

 vincing practically all men of trained intelligence that the 

 animal world, including man, has developed by evolution, 

 not by an infinity of special creations. The law of evolu- 

 tion is as fundamental to our understanding of life as the 

 law of gravitation to our understanding of the inanimate 

 universe. It is less widely accepted merely because its 

 discovery was more recent; the good people who on different 

 grounds still reject it are merely occupying the same quite 

 natural attitude that other good people of their stamp once 

 occupied toward the then newly promulgated doctrine of 

 gravitation. Less than a century ago the Catholic Church 

 kept on the index all books that admitted that the earth 

 went round the sun, and orthodox Protestant clergymen 

 treated as heretical any doubt whether the world had been 

 made in six ordinary days and was more than seven thou- 

 sand years old. 



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