6 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 



for we know too little of it to ask of Nature even an 

 intelligent question which shall bear upon it. But sci- 

 ence does not shrink fronri unanswered problems. What- 

 ever exists may some time be found out, and some day 

 the law of creation may become as much a part of our 

 biological knowledge as the law of heredity bids fair 

 soon to become. 



Having stated our problem of the origin of species, 

 let us see what answers have been made to it by some 

 of the great minds of the past. The past in biology is 

 not far distant, for it is barely a century since biological 

 problems were first treated as living questions. A cen- 

 tury ago, as I have already said, comparatively few 

 species, either of animals or plants, were known to the 

 naturalist, as but few are now known to those who are 

 not engaged in Nature study. Most of these were not 

 known well. The question as to their origin could not 

 be asked, for the very idea of origins was an unfamiliar 

 one. The fact of the enormous succession of ages that 

 makes up geological time, the thought that "time is as 

 long as space is wide," had scarcely entered the minds 

 even of the boldest thinkers of that day. 



In this condition of knowledge the answer to our 

 question was easy. Linnaeus said a century and a half 



ago : " There are as many different spe- 



The answer of • ^, ■,■ a- ^ r 



cies now as there were different forms 

 Linnaeus. 



created in the beginning by the Infinite 

 Being." But Linnseus, with his few boxes of dried 

 plants and his little cabinet of stuffed birds and dried 

 fish skins, had scant conception of the range of variety 

 in Nature, while of the underlying unity he had only 

 occasional glimpses. That the animals and plants in his 

 catalogue were the last in a long succession of life in 

 which species after species had appeared and dropped 

 out, dying or undergoing such changes as to seem to us 



