68 EVOLUTION 



Rivers Museum at Oxford, to give us de- 

 tailed pictures of the state of things in age 

 after age. We must have a series of human 

 skulls, a series of weapons — a series of every- 

 thing that has evolved. 



Similarly, no one can adequately appre- 

 ciate a fullv-formed creature, whether an 

 oak tree or the bird on its branches, a frog 

 or an eel, a butterfly or a starfish, who does 

 not know the stages of its individual develop- 

 ment, from the apparent simplicity of the 

 fertilized egg-cell onwards. Looking down 

 from the summit of a pass which it has taken 

 us all day to reach, we see the village in the 

 valley from which we started at daybreak, 

 and it seems like a great stone's-throw off. 

 The dips and ascents, turns and twists, of 

 our path are all lost to sight; only those who 

 have walked over it know what the climb 

 has really been. So it is w^ith a retrospect 

 on evolution. 



It is an easy thing for us to say that the 

 world of life we see around us to-day has 

 evolved; with equal ease our grandparents 

 said that it had been created. But it is 

 incumbent on the able-minded to give to this 

 doctrine of descent a solid body of fact, so 

 that they may realize something of the 

 grandeur and, let us add, of the difficulty of 

 the proposition. In other volumes of this 



