6 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
for we know too little of it to ask of Nature even an 
intelligent question which shall bear upon it. But sci- 
ence does not shrink from unanswered problems. What- 
ever exists may some time be found out, and some day 
the law of creation may become as much a part of our 
biological knowledge as the law of heredity bids fair 
soon to become. 
Having stated our problem of the origin of species, 
let us see what answers have been made to it by some 
of the great minds of the past. The past in biology is 
not far distant, for it is barely a century since biological 
problems were first treated as living questions. A cen- 
tury ago, as I have already said, comparatively few 
species, either of animals or plants, were known to the 
naturalist, as but few are now known to those who are 
not engaged in Nature study. Most of these were not 
known well. The question as to their origin could not 
be asked, for the very idea of origins was an unfamiliar 
one. The fact of the enormous succession of ages that 
makes up geological time, the thought that “time is as 
long as space is wide,” had scarcely entered the minds 
even of the boldest thinkers of that day. 
In this condition of knowledge the answer to our 
question was easy. Linnzus said a century and a half 
ago: “ There are as many different spe- 
cies now as there were different forms 
created in the beginning by the Infinite 
Being.” But Linnzus, with his few boxes of dried 
plants and his little cabinet of stuffed birds and dried 
fish skins, had scant conception of the range of variety 
in Nature, while of the underlying unity he had only 
occasional glimpses. That the animals and plants in his 
catalogue were the last in a long succession of life in 
which species after species had appeared and dropped 
out, dying or undergoing such changes as to seem to us 
The answer of 
Linneus. 
