78 PRACTICAL LESSONS IN SCIENCE. 



the inorganic world; and the question is often asked, how do 

 you account for, and explain this bewildering variety of life 

 forms and the complex phenomena incident to their existence? 



Until quite recent times, most people believed that the sun, 

 moon and stars, the earth, with all its varied forms of life, and 

 all material things, were created out of nothing. No one could 

 comprehend the idea, but few doubted its truth. But as man be- 

 came more intelligent, the idea of the creation of matter from 

 nothing began to be questioned, not irreverently, but simply 

 from a desire for the truth. This inquiry brought out the fact 

 that the word creation, as used, had different meanings, and the 

 idea began to grow that perhaps matter in its essence is eternal, 

 was not created from nothing, but was moulded or shaped over 

 into its present forms, something as the potter moulds the clay, 

 or the workman makes a watch. And it was believed that every 

 particular form of life was the result of a special act of creation. 

 But a careful study of the phenomena of life has led students of 

 botany, zoology and geology to the conclusion that special crea- 

 tion was not God's method in nature, but that some form of 

 evolution or development was most probably the method 

 employed. Organic development, then, is the great proposi- 

 tion or theory around which the facts and phenomena of the 

 vegetable and animal kingdoms gather for correlation and 

 explanation. 



This theory may prove inadequate ; may not stand the test of 

 future investigation; but it is the only one now recognized by 

 scientific men. No other theory ever promulgated has been as 

 prolific of good results. It has stimulated thought in every de- 

 partment of human endeavor, not only in all lines of scientific 

 work, but in all lines of social and historical work. Thus, whether 

 true or false, every intelligent person should know at least some- 

 thing of the grounds for its existence. Evolution in its present 

 form is a modern theory which required for its elaboration an 

 amount of knowledge whick could only be acquired gradually 

 through years of scientific research. But the idea of evolution is 

 by no means recent; some of its problems have been considered 



