DOCTRINE OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 433 



of one beginning there were many. But if creation be con- 

 ceived of as a frequently recurring process, why limit the 

 frequenc}^? Why not admit that creation is going on con- 

 tinually and that each birth may be a new beginning? Such 

 a continuous creation of new forms fitted to new conditions 

 is precisely what evolutionsts suppose to have taken place. 

 When a creationist comes to believe that the Creator is 

 continually making new forms out of old ones, so that by the 

 accumulation of small changes through many generations 

 great dilTerences result, his theory of creation has already 

 evolved into the doctrine of organic evolution. Modern 

 botanists adopt the evolutionary^ point of view. 



The word evolution i means primarily an unrolling or un- 

 folding. A bud evolves as it expands into a flower. The 

 oak evolves from the acorn germ. In this process of unfold- 

 ing its possibilities the organism passes through successive 

 stages each differing slightly from the one which went before, 

 and from the one which follows; but showing extreme differ- 

 ences between the earliest and the latest stages. The evolu- 

 tion of a species is conceived of by analogy to be a similar 

 unfolding of possibilities through a series of generations, 

 in the course of which new features arise, are inherited, and 

 become more and more pronounced as slight changes con- 

 tinue to appear in parts which had already been slightly 

 changed. Fundamental resemblances between any two in- 

 cUviduals or types are thus accounted for on the supposition 

 that they have inherited from a common ancestor the feat- 

 ures they have in common, while the differences they exhibit 

 are regarded as representing the sum of those small individual 

 differences wliich have continually arisen and been trans- 

 mitted along their diverging lines of descent. Hence, broadly 

 speaking, the degree of likeness becomes a measure of the 

 closeness of kinship. 



On this view it follows that a truly natural system of 

 classifying organisms is an arrangement expressing degrees 

 of kinship as inferred from all the resemblances and differ- 

 ences that can be observed. If we knew enough about all 



' Ev-o-lu'tion < L. evolutus pp. of evolvere, unroll, unfold <e, out; 

 volvere, roll. 



