37 



Darwin had no time to test the accuracy of these weights 

 himself, he took them for granted, as indeed most of us would. 



Another example occurred when I was quite young, and 

 while several of us were discussing the story of the prophet 

 Jonah and the whale. " A mistake somewhere " said one, " a 

 whale could not possibly swallow a man." We all at once took 

 this for granted, and I afterwards found the delusion confirmed 

 in the footnote of an old Bible, which tried to get out of an 

 imaginary difficult)' by explaining that the word also meant 

 " any large fish " (though, of course, a whale is not a fish at all). 

 But on reflection we all know a Sperm whale can swallow not 

 only a man but a boatload of men, together with the boat, and 

 curiously enough would eventually vomit them out, as in the 

 case of Jonah. 



Another well-known instance of the " taken for granted 

 theory," that has done incalculable harm, is, that light could 

 not have been made before the sun. 



That great oceanographer, the Prince of Monaco, once told 

 me that while dredging with his 50,000 metres of wire cable in 

 mid-ocean, at a certain depth he came to a strata of fish with- 

 out eyes, but on going deeper still, he found they had perfectly 

 formed eyes ! 



Sunlight was out of the question in both depths. What 

 was the light ? The very latest discovery of science may suggest 

 that the Rontgen Rays and Radium were both made before the 

 sun, and may perhaps be visible in certain stratas of mid-ocean. 



The next case applies to Protective Colouring, and is, I 

 think, a wonderfully hard nut for an evolutionist to crack. A 

 few weeks ago I was being shown some beautiful illustrations of 

 coloured lepidoptera, with imago, larva, pupa, and food plants, 

 executed by an artist who devotes his talent to insect life. 

 Pointing to the brightly-coloured larvae of the currant moth, 

 standing out conspicuously on its food plant, I said " not much 

 concealment here." He, not knowing my weakness for this 

 particular branch of Natural History, said " No, nor is it needed, 

 for in all such cases it means the larvse are distasteful." I then 

 turned to the cinnabar, the larva of which is as gaudy as that 

 of the currant moth, and in fact rather resembles it, but far 

 more resembles its own food plant, the common ragwort. 



Now, according to the laws of evolution (a law 7 that my 

 friend the artist had taken for granted as applicable here) the 



