SOME DIFFICULTIES ON EVOLUTION, 



93 



are constantly and suddenly appearing. As the eighth Duke of 

 Argyle wrote : " The new forms always appear suddenly from no 

 known source, and generally, if of a new type, exhibit that type 

 in great strength as to numbers." How exactly this fits in with 

 that " progression," which, as Dr. Schofield remarks, is so charac- 

 teristic of Gen. i. ! To meet above difficulty the " possible " *' Im- 

 perfection of the Record " is suggested- But Science knows no 

 resting place on "may be " and "perhaps." As a fact we have, as 

 Urquhart shows in his " Bible and how to read it," rocks, such as 

 the Jurassic, in which occur continuous and undisturbed series of 

 long and tranquil deposits, 1,300 ft. in thickness, in which as many 

 as 1,850 new species have been counted, all of them suddenly born, 

 invariable as far as they go, and superseded by still newer forms. 

 Haeckel hailed Darwin as a great deliverer from the tyranny of the 

 Scriptural Record, which he considered, no doubt rightly, to be the 

 greatest obstacle to the acceptance of Evolution. Darwin provided 

 what Hfieckel called an "anti-Genesis." Certainly Gen. i. in 

 scientific language would be an amusingly pedantic document, and 

 as Dr. Schofield asks pertinently what scientific " language would 

 be the up-to-date one? " The language of Gen. i. is not in advance 

 of the science of any time, it is not behind the science of any time. 

 Professor G. Dana, the well-known geologist, in his " Geology," pp. 

 760, 770, writes : " This document (i.e., the first chapter of Genesis), 

 if true, is of divine origin. It is profoundly philosophical in the 

 scheme of creation it presents. It is both true and divine. It is a 

 declaration of authorship both of creation and the Bible." When 

 W. E. Gladstone proposed Dana as arbitrator between himself and 

 Huxley in their great controversy as to the scientific accuracy of 

 Genesis i., Huxley replied: "There is no man to whose judgment 

 I would more readily bow than Professor Dana." I cannot help 

 strongly deprecating the placing of Christ (see p. 91) as a sort of 

 superman — the last development, by whatever process you please, 

 in a progressive series, beginning with the protozoa and mounting 

 up through the invertebrates to "the natural man." I think this 

 gives the case away, degrades Christ, and contradicts the facts of our 

 Lord's origin, as presented to us in the Scriptures, three things the 

 lecturer would never do wittingly. 



Mr. Theodoee Roberts desired to add another difficulty in the 

 way of the evolution theory, which he remembered the late Lord 

 Salisbury mentioned when delivering his address as President of 

 the British Association nearly 30 years ago. 



It was that the biologists declared that they required at least 50 

 million years for the development of the first protoplasm into a 

 man, whereas the geologists affirmed that some two million years 

 ago the surface of this earth must have been so hot as to make life 

 impossible. 



He thought that many had been attracted to evolution as finding 



