274 The Study of Animal Life PART iv 



believe in almighty volition, but rather as a continuous reality 

 than as expressed in any event of the past. Thus Erasmus 

 Darwin (1794), speaking of Hume, says "he concluded 

 that the world itself might have been generated rather than 

 created ; that it might have been gradually produced from 

 very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its 

 inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of 

 the whole by the Almighty fiat." In short, we have 

 extended to the world around us our own characteristic 

 perception of human history ; we have concluded that in all 

 things the present is the child of the past and the parent 

 of the future. 



But while we dismiss the theory of permanence as 

 demonstrably false, and the theory of successive cataclysms 

 and re-creations as improbable, 1 without feeling it necessary 

 to discuss either the falsity or the improbability, we must 

 state on what basis our conviction of continuous evolution 

 rests. " La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d'aucune 

 creation, c'est d'une continuation eternelle." "As in the 

 development of a fugue," Samuel Butler says, " where, 

 when the subject and counter-subject have been announced, 

 'there must thenceforth be nothing new, and yet all must 

 be new, so throughout organic nature which is a fugue 

 developed to great length from a very simple subject 

 everything is linked on to and grows out of that which 

 comes next to it in order errors and omissions excepted." 



2. Arguments for Evolution. What then are the facts 

 which have convinced naturalists that the plants and the 

 animals of to-day are descended from others of a simpler 

 sort, and the latter from yet simpler ancestors, and so on, 

 back and back to those first forms in which all that suc- 

 ceeded were implied ? I refer you to Darwin's Origin of 

 Species (1859), where the arguments were marshalled in 

 such a masterly fashion that they forced the conviction 



1 I use the word in its literal sense ' ' not admitting of proof. " It is 

 not my duty nor my desire to discuss the poetical, or philosophical, 

 or religious conceptions which lie behind the concrete cosmogonies of 

 different ages and minds. To many modern theologians creation 

 really means the institution of the order of nature, the possibility of 

 natural evolution included. 



