Darwinism. The Noachian Flood: A lecture delivered before the Torquay Natural History Society, Jan. 31st, 1870Stebbing, Thomas Roscoe Rede
Religion
Darwinism. The Noachian Flood: A lecture delivered before the Torquay Natural History Society, Jan. 31st, 1870
Stebbing, Thomas Roscoe Rede
Deluge; Evolution; Natural selection
short stature, brown-skinned, straight-haired, beardless, and
smooth-bodied. The Papuan is taller, is black-skinned, frizzly-haired,
bearded, and hairy-bodied. The former is broad-faced, has a small nose
and flat eyebrows; the latter is long-faced, has a large and prominent
nose, and projecting eyebrows. The Malay is bashful, cold,
undemonstrative and quiet; the Papuan is bold, impetuous, excitable and
noisy. The former is grave and seldom laughs; the latter is joyous and
laughter-loving,—the one conceals his emotions, the other displays them.’
Such is the description and contrast of two types of mankind
geographically separated from one another by an interval of not more than
300 miles; yet the line which separates these two races of the human
family is almost exactly coincident with that deep-sea line which forms
the boundary between two great zoological provinces. Either, then, in
these two distinct but neighbouring localities, the whole multitude of
species, man included, must have been undergoing variation simultaneously
for tens of thousands of years, or else the differences in the whole
multitude, man included, must have been already established, or nearly
so, when first they stepped forth in singular procession from the door of
the ark. But the former alternative, which is the Darwinian, is
consistent with the record of the Noachian Flood in implying that the
inundation was only partial; while the latter alternative contradicts the
record in an essential point on which it is perfectly explicit, by
necessitating the presence in the ark of more than one human family.
As long as we are content to speak of 4000 years or so, some one might be
tempted to fancy, however erroneously, that such a period would be
adequate to produce the existing varieties of mankind, because there is
some evidence of comparatively rapid changes of colour having taken place
under the influence of climate, and because new types of features appears
to be forming with a noticeable progress under the absolutely unique
circumstances which have governed the recent colonization of North
America. Unique those circumstances are, because never before has there
been so much mingling of the blood of different nations and races in a
new and unoccupied field, with much to stimulate and nothing to curb or
repress variation. Never before have men’s minds and bodies in every
faculty been so taxed and strained to activity by the very superabundance
of their resources, the virgin soil of a new country, an inherited
civilization, enormous and ever-enlarging facilities for doing, for
living, moving, and learning—facilities sometimes that cannot be declined
or escaped from, though they ‘fret the pigmy body to decay, and
o’er-inform the tenement of clay.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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