rv MODERN EVOLUTION 205 



quote Huxley's words (written in 1871), by 'the 

 spontaneous retreat of the enemy from nine-tenths 

 of the territory which he occupied ten years ago.' 



The battle has no longer to be fought over the 

 question of the fundamental identity of the physical 

 structure of man and of the anthropoid apes. The 

 most enlightened Protestant divines accept this as 

 proven ; and not a few Catholic divines are adopting 

 an attitude towards it which is only the prelude to 

 surrender. Matters must have moved apace in the 

 Church which Huxley, backed by history, describes 

 as ' that vigorous and consistent enemy of thei 

 highest intellectual, moral, and social life of man- 

 kind,' to permit the Roman Catholic Professor of 

 Physics in the University of Notre Dame, America, 

 to parley as follows : 



* Granting that future researches in palaeontology, 

 anthropology, and biology, shall demonstrate beyond 

 doubt that man is genetically related to the inferior 

 animals, and we have seen how far scientists are 

 from such a demonstration (?), there will not be, 

 even in such an improbable event, the slightest 

 ground for imagining that then, at last, the con- 

 clusions of science are hopelessly at variance with 

 the declarations of the sacred text, or the authorised 

 teachings of the Church of Christ. All that would 

 logically follow from the demonstration of the animal 

 origin of man, would be a modification of the tradi- 

 tional view regarding the origin of the body of our 

 first ancestor. We should be obliged to revise the 

 interpretation that has usually been given to the 

 words of Scripture which refer to the formation of 

 Adam's body, and read these words in the sense 



