310 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
perfect world.” The effect was even deeper and struck at the very 
roots of religious beliefs in that it was made “impossible any longer 
to gaze into heaven just above the sky, and to shudder at the 
rumblings of hell beneath the ground.” Consequently, as Brett * com- 
ments, “The seat of religious belief was thus moved from the heart 
to the head; mysticism was excommunicated by mathematics, * * * 
the way was opened for a liberal Christianity which might ultimately 
supersede traditional beliefs.” 
Incidentally a statement like that is indeed comforting to a zool- 
ogist. It lifts from his shoulders some of the burden placed there by 
the populace for having undermined ancestral beliefs. 
Biology’s central contribution to human thought has been the doc- 
trine of organic evolution. This doctrine has brought coherence and 
order and significance to a multitude of otherwise apparently discon- 
nected facts and theories within the field of biology itself and has 
opened up wide vistas of vision in other fields as well. It is undoubt- 
edly superfluous to mention this to a scientific assemblage such as this, 
but there are scientists, even biologists, who tend to belittle the impor- 
tance of evolution in the scheme of instruction. And here again I am 
moved to wonder whether we see the woods as we look at the trees; 
whether we consider the fact of the evolutionary origin of animals 
and plants as an end in itself and the meticulous details of evidence 
as ends in themselves or whether we look upon them as means to a 
broader end. As ends in themselves they are probably pleasant bed- 
time stories, if you like that kind of story. They are facts and add 
to one’s store of such things, if your hobby is making a collection. If 
that is the spirit in which one presents the matter embellished for good 
measure with much precise detail, I fear that in the words of the phi- 
losopher, Irwin Edman, once applied to some of the humanities, it 
will be shortly “dying of anemia, of archeological hardening of the 
arteries and will become a corpse handled conscientiously by solemn 
morticians.” 
As means to an end the formulation of the doctrine of organic evo- 
lution, like the formulation of the principles of gravity, has served as 
the factual basis for a reorientation of human conceptions. If Newton 
paved the way for a liberalized Christianity, Darwin has paved the 
way for a liberalized sociopolitical outlook. The doctrine of organic 
evolution has once and for all destroyed the concept of the immutabil- 
ity of human institutions as well as of animal bodies. It has destroyed 
finality. If man as an animal is the product of change, his institution, 
the state, as a sociopolitical organization is not immutable. What 
served the purposes of our fathers may not of necessity serve ours. 
And so also have we been conditioned to discard the concept of absolu- 
¢G. S. Brett, Sir Isaac Newton, 1929. 
