332 THE STORY OF THE EARTH AND MAN. 



that it may be defined in a line. ... If a single 

 cell under appropriate conditions becomes a man in 

 tbe space of a few years, there can surely be no difii- 

 culty in understanding how, under appropriate con- 

 ditions, a cell may in the course of untold millions of 

 years give origin to the human race/^ 



"It is trae that many minds are so unfurnished 

 with those experiences of nature, out of which this 

 conception is built, that they find difficulty in form- 

 ing it. . . . To such the hypothesis that by any 

 series of changes a protozoan should ever give origin 

 to a mammal seems grotesque — as grotesque as did 

 Galileo's assertion of the earth's movement seem to 

 the Ai4stot cleans ; or as grotesque as the assertion 

 of the earth's sphericity seems now to the New 

 Zealanders." 



I quote the above as a specimen of evolutionist 

 reasoning from the hand of a master, and as referring 

 to one of the corner-stones of this strange philosophy. 

 I may remark with respect to it, in the first place, 

 that it assumes those " conditions ^' of evolution to 

 which I have already referred. In the second place, 

 it is full of inaccurate statements of fact, all in a 

 direction tending to favour the hypothesis. For ex- 

 ample, a tree does not differ " immeasurably " from a 

 seed, especially if the seed is of the same species of 

 tree, for the principal parts of the tree and its 

 principal chemical constituents already exist and can 

 be detected in the seed, and unless it were so, the 

 development of the tree from the seed could not take 



