LIFE THE TRAVELER 
great, honest, patient, penetrating investigator, and 
his inquiries put biological science in the front ranks 
of the great sciences, alongside of astronomy and 
geology, making with them the great trinity of 
sciences. 
Darwin made no attempt to grapple with the 
question of the nature and origin of life itself, but 
only with the evolution of the many forms of life. 
He was not a laboratory naturalist, but a student 
of the drama of animate nature as it is enacted 
on the earth’s surface. He held to the special and 
miraculous creation theory of his fathers, but 
limited it to one or more forms. Out of this begin- 
ning he thought, through the fortuitous operation 
of natural selection, all the myriad forms of life 
have been evolved. This is Darwinism in its sim- 
plest terms — a miraculous beginning of life, but 
a natural unfolding. Is it not like asking us to 
credit the immaculate conception, followed by the 
birth of a normal baby, and its normal development 
into child and man? 
Darwin formed his ideas of natural selection 
upon artificial selection, but the two are funda- 
mentally unlike. There is an active agent involved 
in the one case, which has specific and limited ends 
to attain, and hence which thwarts the tendencies 
of nature. But what is the active agent correspond- 
ing to man, in the other? Natural selection is the 
name for a process set going and kept going by the 
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