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DR. ALFRED T. SCHOFIELD ON 



Professor Alfred Russell ^yallace, when referring to the question 

 as to how life originated in this planet, affirmed that power was 

 exercised from without. In a word, life was given to the earth. 



Mr. W. HosTE said : I hardly think Dr. Schofield need have been 

 so apologetic at the beginning of his admirable paper. If he is an 

 outsider, there are no " insiders." Even a Max-Miiller could not 

 pose as an expert on the language of primitive man ; the best of 

 cartographers could not produce a reliable map of the other side 

 of the moon. It is difficult to see how a man can be an " esoteric " 

 Evolutionist. No one has ever seen evolution in process, nor is 

 there one direct proof that any of the four foundations of 

 Darwinism, unlimited variability, unlimited time for variation, 

 transmission of acquired characteristics or natural selection, repose 

 on anything more solid than assumption. AVe can all read books. 

 The man who reads the most on this subject, unless he has some- 

 thing better than man's word to go by, should be the most muddled, 

 for the voices are very conflicting. I think Dr. Schofield might 

 have added, to his modern gods and goddesses — "Science," a swollen 

 puffed-out word, glibly used by the scientists of the penny Press ; 

 but the best scientists allow there is much more outside than inside 

 it. Dubois-Raymond says of natural selection: "We seem to have 

 the sensation in holding to this doctrine of a man hopelessly sinking, 

 who is grasping a single plank that keeps him above water." Then 

 why hold to it ? "VVeissman long ago assured the scientific world 

 that if they gave up " Evolution," and especially " Darwinism." 

 nothing remained but " Creation," of course, a reJuctio ad 

 ahsurdum; but Wilser writes: "He is no scientist who has not 

 settled accounts with Darwinism." Hteckel was so anxious to prove 

 " Evolution " that he used to do a little forging on his own account 

 in his embryological diagrams. When forced to confess this, as he 

 did in the " Miinchener Allegemeiner Zeitung," of January 9, 1909, 

 he covered his retreat by asserting: "The great majority of all 

 morphological, anatomical, histological and embryological diagrams 

 . . . . are not true to Nature, but are more or less doctored, 

 schematized, and reconstructed." It is the little boy's excuse for 

 robbing the orchard. It might not be without use to remember this 

 when visiting the South Kensington Museum. Hseckel became very 

 unpopular with his fellow scientists. Some scientists have been 

 known to develope cannibalistic tendencies. The " odium scien- 

 tificum " is as real as the " odium theologicum." 



As for the process of Evolution itself, should we not have expected 

 in the earliest strata containing organic fossils, that these would 

 have been at first all of one sort, gradually merging by a series of 

 infinitely small variations into new types ? In reality it is discon- 

 certing to find on the contrary at the very start a large variety of 

 animal remains, some of which disappear altogether, while others 

 persist for ages, unchanged, like the ammonites ; while new forms 



