EVOLUTION IN GENERAL 



stated like the record of any other set of facts ; 

 it may be told with a theological bias or with 

 an anti-theological bias ; theories of the process 

 may be added by this thinker or by that; but 

 these are not of the substance of the story. 

 Whether history is told by a Gibbon or a Green 

 the facts remain, and whether Evolution be told 

 by a Haeckel or a Wallace we accept the narra- 

 tive so far as it is a rendering of Nature, and no 

 more. It is true, before this story can be fully 

 told, centuries still must pass. At present there 

 is not a chapter of the record that is wholly 

 finished. The manuscript is already worn with 

 erasures, the writing is often blurred, the very 

 language is uncouth and strange. Yet even now 

 the outline of a continuous story is beginning to 

 appear — a story whose chief credential lies in the 

 fact that no imagination of man could have de- 

 signed a spectacle so wonderful, or worked out a 

 plot at once so intricate and so transcendently 

 simple. 



This story will be outlined here partly for the 

 story and partly for a purpose. A historian dare 

 not have a prejudice, but he cannot escape a pur- 

 pose — the purpose, conscious or unconscious, of 

 unfolding the purpose which lies behind the facts 

 which he narrates. The interest of a drama — the 



