INTRODUCTION 



To many people, the nineteenth century seems to be 

 the age of a great consummation. In the course of that 

 century, the material sciences were freed from the 

 shackles that had held them, and the work of the great 

 pioneers, Newton, Franklin, Kepler, Lamarck, and the 

 rest was developed with an amazing rapidity and 

 resource. And to those who came to maturity in the 

 last decades of this remarkable period, the material 

 sciences still appear to be the consummation of man- 

 kind's intellectual opportunity. Just as our forefathers 

 opposed and sneered at the coming of Science, so these 

 representatives of the great materialistic age resent and 

 combat the greater promises of our own time. For them 

 Charles Darwin is still the splendid discoverer of man's 

 origin and they dread the coming of the finer and more 

 inclusive theory of Being which will turn Darwin's 

 Descent of Man and The Origin of Species into interesting 

 relics of an old and superseded mode of thought. 



For as the earlier reactionaries were powerless to 

 oppose the ' march of science ' so will these conserva- 

 tive scientists of our own day be borne down under the 

 mass of the accumulating evidence. Darwin's theory 

 that natural selection coupled with the influences of 

 environment were the sole instruments by which the 

 process of physical and intellectual evolution were 

 achieved, has failed to explain the facts. For more 

 than twenty years now, a newer school of thought has 

 been throwing doubt on these so-called classic factors 

 of evolution ; and, in my opinion, the work of Dr Geley 

 not only confirms these doubts beyond all dispute, but 



