153 
NOTE. 
ON MAN’S PLACE IN NATURE. 
As regards theories on this subject, one, which has been somewhat 
urged of late, is thus referred to by the President of the Institute, 
Sir G. Gabriel Stokes, P.R.S., in his paper On the absence of real 
opposition between Science and Revelation (Vol. XVII, p. 195). He 
says :— 
“Some have endeavoured to combine the statements of Scripture 
with a modified hypothesis of continuous transmutation, by sup- 
posing that at a certain epoch in the world’s history mental and 
moral powers were conferred by divine interposition on some 
animal that had been gradually modified in its bodily structure by 
natural causes till it took the form of man. As special interposi- 
tion and special creation are here recognised, I do not see that 
religion has anything to lose by the adoption of this hypothesis; 
but neither do I see that science has anything to gain. Once 
admit special divine interposition, and science has come to the end 
of her tether. Those who find the idea helpful can adopt it; but 
for my own part this combination of the natural and the super- 
natural seems somewhat grotesque,* and I prefer resting in the 
statement of a special creation, without prying into its method.” 
Sir J. William Dawson, C.M.G., F.R.S., in his new work, 
Modern ideas of Evolution, thus refers to man, anatomically con- 
sidered :— 
* Of course it is not to the combination in itself that this is meant to 
apply, but to the combination in our attempted reasoning ; in other words, 
to the endeavour to infer from merely natural laws what was the condi- 
tion anterior to the stage at which a supernatural power is supposed to 
have intervened. 
