It is time to proceed to the proof of the contentions of this paper. In presenting it, I shall first recall to the reader passages—some of them, doubtless, already familiar—from Huxley or other post-Darwinian defenders of the evolution theory, and then exhibit the parallel arguments found in Chambers, Spencer and other pre-Darwinians. Since, in such a case, textual precision is of some importance, it is hardly needful to apologize for copious citation of the ipsissima verba of the authors in question. The arguments for evolution will be taken up in the order of their generality or of their logical interconnection.
It is necessary first of all, however, to remind the reader of the general outlines of the situation in the science of the time. It was a situation essentially different from that in which Lamarck had carried on the propaganda of transformism. The difference was due to two changes that had taken place in the intervening period. First, the science of geology had gone through a brilliant development, and had fought and won its battle against religious orthodoxy; and in England, though not all geologists were consistent uniformitarians, all geology had been profoundly influenced by the principles and the methods of Hutton and Lyell. Second, the two allied subsidiary sciences of paleontology and stratigraphic geology had been created, through the work of Cuvier and of William Smith. One result was that the recognized age of the planet had been vastly extended; enough time was thus granted for the evolutionary process. A still more significant result was that the Mosaic cosmogony had been entirely abandoned by even the most orthodox of men of science. The doctrine of creation which such men defended against the hypothesis of development no longer bore any close resemblance to the narratives of Genesis; it was no longer a question of a single, original creation of all things, but of a large number of repeated acts of "special creation," separated from one another by wide intervals of time, and confined to the production of organisms. Meanwhile, it was assumed, in the organic realm things were going on in an orderly and normal manner, in accordance with natural laws of geologic change; even the Cuvierian "catastrophes" were "natural" phenomena. The effect, in short, of the triumph of geology had been, curiously enough, to increase the resort to supernatural agency in the current accounts of the genesis of the existing order of nature. In place of one great, obscure miracle at the origination of the universe, the revised version of the doctrine of creation assumed a large number of petty and definite miracles; it supposed, in Chambers's words, "an immediate exertion of the creative power, at one time to produce zoophytes, at another time to add a few marine mollusks, another to bring in one or two Crustacea, again to produce crustaceous fishes, again perfect fishes, and so on to the end."[1] Creationism, to conform to the accepted principles and accumulated knowledge of geological science, had been
- ↑ Chambers, "Vestiges," 1844, Ch. XI.
