This is one of the tasks to which science is now giving itself. The answer is uncertain and halting. A few things seem clear; others seem to be nearly certain; of still others we can only say that for the present we must be content with the knowledge we have. But if we take the best we have and work over it thoughtfully and carefully, the better will slowly come, and in time we shall know far more than we now suspect. Meanwhile, it is the attempt of this book to give to people whose training is other than scientific some conception of this great story of creation. Without dogmatic certainty but without indecision it tries to tell what modern science thinks as to the great problems of life. It tries to describe the possible origin of animals and plants, their slow advance, the length of their steady uplift, the forces that brought it about. It tries to tell a little of the men who have helped to develop the great idea of evolution, of the great men who persuaded the scientific world of its truth, and of the later minds that are modifying and enlarging the idea of the master evolutionist. It tries to tell what science perhaps vaguely hopes as to the future. What are we to be? Can we help the great advance? The Meaning of Evolution CHAPTER I EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN Ever since men have been able to think they must have puzzled out for themselves some way of accounting for their own beginnings. Every savage tribe with whom we have any intimate acquaintance has some story that accounts for the origin of the tribe at least, and often for the beginning of the world. These stories are handed down from generation to generation and are scarcely questioned in the thought of most men. In early Greece there was a succession of men whom the world calls philosophers. These men thought earnestly and deeply on all kinds of questions. Their method was not our method. The plan of making a long series of observations, before coming to any conclusion, was not the habit of their minds. They reasoned out on general principles what seemed to them must have been the origin of the world. It is not strange that among these should come, now and then, some one who in some passage or other should show that there had come to his mind at least a glimmer of the thought that was later to develop into the great idea which the modern world calls evolution.