Charles Robert Darwin. 39 



it is still doubtful whether he will be a dog, a horse, or a 

 man. At a certain stage the human embryo has gill-slits in. 

 the neck, and arteries branching towards them as in a fish. 

 Later the great toe projects at an angle laterally, as in the 

 quadrumana. When well advanced, there is a tail longer 

 than the legs at the same period, and with a good extensor 

 muscle. The presence of hair all over the body, except the 

 palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, at the sixth 

 month of foetal life is remarkably suggestive. What do — 

 what can — all these things mean if not that the embryonic 

 stages of the individual man repeat the stages through 

 which the human race has come ? From the standpoint 

 of organic evolution they are comprehensible enough. 

 From the standpoint of special creation they present 

 the Creator in no enviable light. He is like a man 

 who, setliing out to build a Cunarder, makes a dug- 

 out first and then refashions this into a raft, and this 

 in turn into some clumsy junk or proa, and so on. But he 

 is worse than this ; for, if he has pursued the method of spe- 

 cial creation, he has done his best to make it seem to us 

 that he has pursued the method of organic evolution. All 

 the facts — and they are innumerable — are upon this side. 

 There are only a tradition and a prejudice upon the other. 



Such, briefly and nakedly, is Darwin's argument for the 

 development of species by means of natural selection and 

 the preservation of the fittest. To its illustration and its 

 confirmation he has brought a countless multitude of facts, 

 all tending to show that the progressive adaptation of plants 

 and animals to their environment is procured by the heap- 

 ing up of beneficial variations. It is an hypothesis which 

 corresponds with natiiral classification, which accounts for 

 structural adaptation and for rudimentary organs, which 

 tallies with the geological record and with the geographical 

 distribution of plants and animals, which at once explains 

 the facts of embryology and finds in them its amplest con- 

 firmation. The most of you can well remember how it was 

 at first received. Tlie scientists and theologians vied with 

 each other in their conteni])t and scorn. It was because the 

 scientists were so often theologians in disguise. Hundreds 

 and thousands of books and pamphlets and newspaper ar- 

 ticles and sermons were poured out — so many vials of wrath 

 — upon the quiet Kentishman, who in the meantime went 

 on experimenting Avith his pigeons and insectivorous plants 



