DARWINISM ATTACKED. 55 



lie between twenty and forty millions of years. The evolu- 

 tionists of the gradual line, however, have supposed many 

 thousands of millions of years to be the smallest amount 

 that would account for the whole range of evolution, from 

 the very beginning until the appearance of mankind. This 

 large discrepancy has always been a source of doubt and a 

 weapon in the hands of opponents of the evolutionary idea, 

 and it is especially in this country that much good work has 

 been done to overcome this difficulty. The theory of descent 

 had to be remoulded. On this point conviction has grown 

 in America during the last decades with increasing rapidity." 

 However (according to a newspaper clipping), Professor 

 Lankester, 29 a present-day Darwinian champion, in the 



course of an interesting outline of the advance- 

 Eadmm a pos- 



sible answerto ment of science in the past twenty-five years 

 the objection. w hi c h he gave at the opening meeting of the 

 British Association at York recently (September, 1906) 

 again raised the question of the age of the earth. Refer- 

 ring to the discovery of radium as one far exceeding in 

 importance all other modern scientific discoveries he said 

 that if the sun contained a fraction of one per cent, of radium, 

 this radium would account for and make good the heat that 

 is annually lost by the sun. "This is a tremendous fact, 

 upsetting all calculations of physicists as to duration in past 

 and future of the sun's heat and the temperature of the 

 earth's surface. The geologists and the biologists have long 

 contended that some thousand million years must have 

 passed during which the earth's surface has presented ap- 

 proximately the same conditions of temperature as at pres- 

 ent, in order to allow time for the evolution of living things 

 and the formation of aqueous deposits of the earth's crust. 

 The physicists," contended Professor Lankester, "notably 

 Professor Tait and Lord Kelvin, refused to allow more than 

 ten million years (which they have subsequently increased 

 to a hundred million, basing the estimate on the rate of 



