POCKET SERIES NO. 467 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius Evolution Made Plain John Mason HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS Copyright, 1923, Haldeman-Julius Company. EVOLUTION MADE PLAIN _The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few--when it must be woven into the common life of the world.--Agassiz._ _Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, * * * but to weigh and consider.--Bacon._ _The man who will not investigate both sides of a question is dishonest.--Abraham Lincoln._ _Intolerance is the product of an ignorant, primitive mind. We should tolerate anything of an intellectual nature except intolerance. Freedom of opinion is the root, flower and fruit of liberty--its very essence.--Anonymous._ WHAT EVOLUTION IS AND IS NOT Addison said, “The real substance of a bulky volume can be condensed into a small pamphlet.”; and it is believed that the fundamental principles of a great scientific discovery like evolution can be outlined in a few pages, and in a way so plain and in words so simple that any one who is at all interested can get a fairly good understanding of its scope. With this idea in mind an attempt is here made to explain evolution, to tell what some of its laws are and how they work, and to present briefly some of the evidences that support the doctrine. Contrary to popular belief evolution is not confined to the origin of man, but it explains how all living things have become as we now see them, and how and why the most of them are being changed. It teaches that all living species of plants and animals, including man, also the thousands of extinct species which have left their fossil records in stratified rocks, have been developed from a few small and simple forms--probably one, and that a mere cell. And it shows, too, that this has been done by the operation of natural laws, the same laws we see in operation today. Evolution does not teach that every living thing is “day by day, in every way, growing better and better.” On the contrary, it shows that many species deteriorate, are driven to the wall and become extinct, while only the best fitted survive. For instance, of the twenty-five orders of reptiles in the Jurassic period--known to the geologists by their fossils--only five have come down to our times. But out of the reptilian orders, then the highest forms of living things, have come the superior orders of later times--birds and mammals. And this is evolution.