CREATION BY EVOLUTION
gen, and nitrogen bathed in light, heat, water, and air. So we all admit. But all life, so far as we know, starts from life, and every living being had some sort of living ancestry, moulded by the shifting and sifting of environment.
As to the origin of life on the earth we know nothing whatever. Speculation about it is more or less futile; indeed it may be mischievous, as when some particular unproved suggestion serves as a basis for further philosophical expansion. Science must stop where the facts stop, or thereabout, the limit of "thereabout" covering all legitimate diversions and excursions of philosophy.
Volumes have been devoted to the evidence of evolution, but their value depends on no single fact nor on hundreds of facts. The inevitable conclusion is that all the facts point the same way. All the evidence, whether drawn from comparative anatomy, embryology, physiology, or geographical distribution, from human institutions or from human history, brings us to the same result. All of it deals with the same truth as seen from a thousand different sides. All life has its roots in the past and its fruitage in the future. We must view the millions of kinds of living beings not as disconnected entities resulting from disconnected acts of creation, but as divergent twigs from the great parent tree of life. In a large sense, there is, as Parker observes, "only one kind of life in our world."
"What we mean by life is protoplasmic organization. Just what this is, we do not know. . . . It is continuous and has been continuous since the remote past and will continue indefinitely in the future. Vitality is the activity of the organization. Death is not of necessity the cessation of vitality; death occurs only with the disintegration of the machine. When this occurs with any single organism acting as trustee for the specific organization, there are myriads of
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