HOW DARWINISM STANDS TO-DAY 



Universal Acceptance of the Evolution Idea 



WHEN people speak of Darwinism they sometimes mean 

 the general idea of evolution that the present is the 

 child of the past and the parent of the future. Now 

 the evolutionary way of looking at things has certainly been con- 

 firmed by the progress of science and is almost unanimously ac- 

 cepted by competent judges to-day. This horse that gallops past 

 on the tiptoe of one digit on each foot is the natural outcome of 

 an ancestral stock of small-hoofed mammals that used to plod 

 about in the Eocene meadows, with four toes on each fore-foot 

 and three and a vestige on each hind-foot. This bird that flies 

 past is the descendant of such an old-fashioned type as the Jurassic 

 Archa?opteryx an archaic bird with teeth in both jaws, a long 

 tail like a lizard's, and a sort of half -made wing. And this first- 

 known bird must be traced back to an ancestry among the extinct 

 Dinosaur reptiles, though the precise pedigree remains hidden in 

 the rocks. These reptiles must be traced back to certain primitive 

 amphibians, and these to certain old-fashioned fishes, and so on, 

 back and back, till we lose our clue in the thick mist of life's be- 

 ginnings. If this is Darwinism it stands more firmly than ever, 

 except that we are more keenly aware than in Darwin's day of 

 our ignorance as to the origin and affiliation of the great classes. 

 But, frankly, the only scientific way of looking at the present-day 

 fauna and flora is to regard them as the outcome of a natural evo- 

 lution. In a previous chapter this statement has been justified. 



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