ON CEEATION OE EVOLUTION. 181 



;shoi-e of fact, so that time has been on the side of the older 

 theory. The fact that the consensus of current biological 

 teaching is in iavour of evolution hardly needs much proof. 

 If Mr. Herbert Spencer can make the compendious claims 

 which he did lately in Lord Salisburif on Evolution, Mr. 

 Wallace reminds us, from time to time, of the Method of 

 Organic Evolidion, proof of the fact not seeming necessary ; 

 Professor Haeckel could make it a strong point in the praises 

 of Lang's Comparative Anatoiny, in his prefatory remarks, 

 that " he has always endeavoured to give the phylogenetic 

 significance of ontogenetic facts " ; if Professor Huxley 

 could say in the Encyclopwdia Britannica that " on the 

 evidence of pala3ontology the evolution of many existing 

 forms of animal life from their predecessors is no longer an 

 hypothesis but an historical fact" ; if Romanes could say of 

 this theory that " it is held to be virtually a completed 

 induction " ; if Professor Karl Pearson, in an attack upon 

 Lord Salisbury's Address, recognising " the danger of the 

 reaction which is spreading among us," could say that " the 

 danger to science .... was in truth small," this 

 indicating evolutionary teaching of course, the elegant 

 description of the opposing line of thought being " the old 

 bigotry " ; if Professor Marsh could say a few years ago that 

 "to doubt evolution is to doubt science, and science is only 

 another name for truth " ; and if the " story of Creation " 

 can be told by Mr. Clodd with nearly equal authority, 

 though hardly the majesty of Genesis, fi-om the opposite 

 point of view ; and if the scientific and quasi-scientific press 

 is full of references to it and assumptions that never raise a 

 question of its truth — if these things be so, it behoves the 

 man of faith to give good reasons from the side of science 

 Avhich justify him in still believing those noble words, " In 

 the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." 



Before proceeding to the special consideration of this 

 theory and its imperial claims, it may be remarked that the 

 ranks of evolutionists are anything but united, and the 

 divergences of view become ever more marked. To take a 

 few notable specimens : Darwin's views oti the origin of 

 species by natural selection through heredity, great as was 

 the revolution they produced, were not concerned with that 

 *' great progression of nature from the inorganic to tlie 

 organic, the formless to the formed, the simple to the 

 complex " which Huxley and Haeckel have assisted in 

 adding to the original theory. Mr. Wallace, who has been 



