180 WALTER KIDD, ESQ., M.D., F.Z.S., 



but these are not the leaders of thoii-^-ht witli whom the 

 believer in creation has to reckon. 



The first question may be to a great extent answered hy 

 an illustration. The delta of the IMississippi is n vast area 

 comprisiijo' 12,800 square miles, and the river itself g-reat 

 enough to deposit sediment annually to the extent of 

 812,500,000,000 pounds. But great as is the delta and 

 great as is the potential value of its silt, it is nothing in 

 regard to force when compared to the river, as it flowed within 

 its banks. Though this vast amount of detritus leaves ferti- 

 lizing alluvium on the neighbouring land to be utilized in 

 other days by other men, the river has wandered into a 

 thousand dwarfed chamiels, and in the Gulf of Mexico has 

 lost itself for ever. Such a change as that of a river into its 

 delta may well describe the pj'csent or closely approaching* 

 position of the theory of evolution, and indicates its weak- 

 ness as an attacking force. Some explanation may here he 

 given of the introduction into such questions as those of 

 evolution and creation of terms which suggest strife. In ihe 

 popular view, in its earlier days, Darwinism was nothing if 

 not combative, however little its great founder was respon- 

 sible for this. It was not unnatural, probably necessary, in 

 the state of public opinion which then existed, that Huxley 

 should employ the imagery of war in his brilliant essays 

 against superstition. Hebrew tradition and other "strangled 

 snakes.'" But this was very much what gave pith and point to 

 evolutionary literature. N ow, however, seeing that the theory 

 of evolution is still an unproved theory, and that the citadel of 

 faith is more full than ever of warriors, whose attacks are 

 directed rather against the common foe under the aspect of 

 heathenism than of evolutionary agnosticism, a dangerous 

 slowing of the cniTent of the evolutionary river has set in, 

 and no better description of the state of things can be given 

 than that of a German writer, " a confused and indefinite 

 movement of the mind of the age " — in fact the delta-stage. 



For answer to the first question more is recpiired than 

 illustration and assertion, but the facts which su})ply this 

 will be best derived from the answer which will be ofiercd to 

 the second question. Seeing then that the majority of 

 biologists accept the evolution hypothesis in some form or 

 other, is there more now to be said in favoiu- of the creation 

 hypothesis than there Avas in 1880? Pn)gress there has 

 been, of a remarkal)le kind, but that "last infirmity of noble 

 mind"' has led many out of their depth, and far from the 



