52 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OP WASHINGTON. 



Creation implies the actual fashioning of forms in full panoply, 

 and with all the characteristics of their kind. But when it was 

 asked how this had been effected the answer was vague and evasive. 

 Did "elemental atoms flash into living tissues ? " Was there vacant 

 space one moment and an elephant apparent the next ? Or did 

 a laborious God mould out of gathered earth a body to then endue 

 with life ? The questions are surely pertinent, for only by such 

 means can we conceive of creation. But passionate disclaimers and 

 angry denunciations greeted him who would frame such conceptions 

 in exact language. Metaphysical jargon and rhetoric about divine 

 purposes might sophisticate, but could not answer. 



Evolution denotes the derivation of living beings from preceding 

 in endless succession. Variation in progeny, limited heredity, and 

 time are its correlatives. These being conceded, the peopling of 

 the globe with its life, past and present, is conceivable. 



What was the evidence to support the conflicting conceptions ? 



For creation it was urged that the universal consensus of mankind 

 supported it ; that divine revelation taught it ; and that the diver- 

 sities and specialization of organic forms forbade the idea of their 

 derivation from a common parentage. 



The universal consensus of mankind maintained till the sixteenth 

 century the doctrine that the earth was flat ; that the sun and other 

 planets circled round the earth ; and that the earth was the great 

 centre of the universe. The universal consensus of mankind for 

 thousands of years is not the universal concensus of the enlight- 

 ened man, nor of the present century. 



The teachers of revelation have been often mistaken. Many are 

 they who once were contemned and denounced because their utter- 

 ances were not in accordance with the opinions of their day, who 

 are now accepted as the champions of a purer religion. One of the 

 wisest priests of England has said that "with a certain class of 

 religionists every invention and discovery is considered impious and 

 unscriptural as long as it is new. Not only the discoveries of as- 

 tronomy and geology, but steam, gas, electricity, political economy, 



