2 EVOLUTION THE KEY TO NATURE 



science could give no answer. Why had he this thin 

 and useless coat of hair on his body? Why was his 

 cat so like a tiger? Why did miners bring petrified 

 fish-bones out of the deepest mines? Why was the 

 negro black and the Chinaman yellow? Why was 

 the moon cold, the sun hot, and the earth between 

 the two? Why were Englishmen civilized and 

 Africans not? Why had flowers different colours? 

 Why was there such an immense variety of animals ? 

 Why were there tape-worms? Why had the shark 

 no bones? Why was England an island? Why were 

 there fiords in Norway? 



You could fill an immense book with questions that 

 could not be answered eighty years ago. And, apart 

 from the fact that science was very young and needed 

 more time, all these things were obscure, and 

 threatened to remain obscure, because one single, 

 simple idea had not yet been grasped. That idea was 

 to be the starting point of the explanation of all these 

 and hundreds of thousands of other problems. It was 

 this: That nature, and all things in nature, had 

 grown, during tens of millions of years, to be what 

 they were. They had been shaped very slowly and 

 gradually, and had passed through numerous earlier 

 forms. They had been "evolved." 



The word "evolution" is the Latin word for 

 "unrolling." Roman books were written on parch- 

 ment and rolled on wooden or ivory rods, as maps 

 are to-day. Unrolling one, to read it, was "evolu- 



