198 The Bible of Nature 



and ancestral contributions. But when a great 

 step in evolution has been taken — such as the 

 origin of Vertebrates, or of any of the great classes 

 of Vertebrates — Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, or 

 Mammals — our estimate of the advance made is 

 not affected by our knowledge of the origin. To 

 depreciate man because he had non-human an- 

 cestors is like judging a statue by the quarry. Is 

 it a poor genealogy that the naturalists give man ? 

 But man may always say "Je suis un ancetre.'" 



Perhaps the deepest repugnance is due to the 

 misunderstanding to which we have already al- 

 luded, that according to science Man was a happy 

 accident. But whatever careless writers may have 

 said, this is not the scientific view. Take a sen- 

 tence rather from one of the foremost exponents — 

 Professor E. Ray Lankester: ''Man is held to be 

 a part of Nature, a product of the definite and 

 orderly evolution which is universal; a being re- 

 sulting from and driven by the one great nexus 

 of mechanism which we call Nature." This may 

 not be the whole truth about Man, but here at any 

 rate there is no suggestion of fortuity. Again he 

 writes, " Man forms a new departure in the grad- 

 ual unfolding of Nature's predestined scheme." 

 Mr. Balfour writes in the ''Foundations of Belief" 

 (p. 75): "An irrational universe which acciden- 

 tally turns out a few reasoning animals at one 

 corner of it, as a rich man may experiment at one 



