32 EVOLUTION 



It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, 

 who of course differs fundamentally from that inferior class of 

 human beings known to all of us in our own minds as ' other 

 people,' that almost every point in the catalogue thus briefly 

 enumerated is a popular fallacy of the wildest description. 

 Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than George 

 Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the 

 electric telegraph. We are not descended from men with 

 tails, any more than we are descended from Indian elephants. 

 There is no evidence that we have anything in particular 

 more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with our poor 

 relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search 

 of a ' missing link ' ; few links are anywhere missing, and 

 those are for the most part wholly unimportant ones. If 

 we found the imaginary link in question, he would not be 

 a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. And so forth 

 generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and 

 current fallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary 

 teaching. Whatever most people think evolutionary is for 

 the most part a pure parody of the evolutionist's opinion. 



But a more serious error than all these pervades what 

 we may call the drawing-room view of the evolutionist 

 theory. So far as Society with a big initial is concerned, 

 evolutionism first began to be talked about, and therefore 

 known (for Society does not read ; it listens, or rather it 

 overhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin 

 published his ' Origin of Species.' That great book con- 

 sisted simply of a theory as to the causes which led to the 

 distinctions of kind between plants and annuals. With 

 evolution at large it had nothing to do ; it took for granted 

 the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, the 

 earth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the 

 mountains and the valleys, nay even life itself in the crude 

 form, everything in fact, save the one point of the various 



