

CURRENT THEORIES OF EVOLUTION )) 
by: Jie Pi LOTSY. 
The biologist, travelling in America, is greatly impressed by the 
astonishing diversity of- scenery, climate and life on this wonderful 
continent. 
Within a few days he passes from winter to summer, from humid 
regions to deserts, from high peaks to chasms of the amazing depth 
of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, from the Giant Cactz in the 
desert of Arizona to the Giant Macrocystis, thrown by the waves 
of the Pacific on a Californian beach, from the treeless plains of 
Kansas and Texas to those Giants of the Forest — the Sequoza’s 
of the Yosemite — the grandeur of which can only be felt, not 
described. 
No less diversity is revealed, to even the casual observer, in 
regard to the minds of the inhabitants of this vast continent. 
While there is, on the one hand, a remarkable output of first-class 
work in the fields of Heredity and Evolution, which has made the 
names of many American Scientists well known all over the world, 
there is another type of mind, whose reputation, I fear, will not be 
as enviable as that of the men just referred to. A Mr. BRYAN, a 
Dr. PORTER and a certain Mc. CANN, apparently, try to revive the 
times of 1859 in England, when DARWIN’s book on the Origin of 
Species caused so much adverse comment in orthodox religious circles. 
The older ones among us remember how at a meeting of the Bri- 
tish Association for the Advancement of Science, Bishop WILBERFORCE 
asked Hux Ley, whether he descended in the male or in the female 
line from a monkey, and how the Bishop received the memorable 
answer that HuxLEY would not have been ashamed of apes among 
his ancestors, but that he would have felt very much ashamed of 


1) Read at the Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science at Salt Lake City, Utah July 1922. 
Genetica. 25 
