The Story of the Earth and ManDawson, John William, Sir
Science
The Story of the Earth and Man
Dawson, John William, Sir
Human beings -- Origin; Paleontology
Many naturalists who should know better are puzzled with the great
array of facts presented by evolutionists; and while their better
judgment causes them to doubt as to the possibility of the structures
which they study being produced by such blind and material processes,
are forced to admit that there must surely be something in a theory so
confidently asserted, supported by so great names, and by such an
imposing array of relations which it can explain. They would be
relieved from their weak concessions were they to study carefully a
few of the instances adduced, and to consider how easy it is by a
little ingenuity to group undoubted facts around a false theory. I
could wish to present here illustrations of this, which abound in
every part of the works I have referred to, but space will not permit.
One or two must suffice. The first may be taken from one of the
strong points often dwelt on by Spencer in his "Biology."[BB]
[BB] "Principles of Biology," § 118.
"But the experiences which most clearly illustrate to us the process
of general evolution are our experiences of special evolution,
repeated in every plant and animal. Each organism exhibits, within a
short space of time, a series of changes which, when supposed to
occupy a period indefinitely great and to go on in various ways
instead of one, may give us a tolerably clear conception of organic
evolution in general. In an individual development we have compressed
into a comparatively infinitesimal space a series of metamorphoses
equally vast with those which the hypothesis of evolution assumes to
have taken place during those unmeasurable epochs that the earth's
crust tells us of. A tree differs from a seed immeasurably in every
respect--in bulk, in structure, in colour, in form, in specific
gravity, in chemical composition: differs so greatly that no visible
resemblance of any kind can be pointed out between them. Yet is the
one changed in the course of a few years into the other; changed so
gradually that at no moment can it be said, 'Now the seed ceases to be
and the tree exists.' What can be more widely contrasted then a
newly-born child and the small gelatinous spherule constituting the
human ovum? The infant is so complex in structure that a cyclopædia
is needed to describe its constituent parts. The germinal vesicle is
so simple that it may be defined in a line.... If a single cell under
appropriate conditions becomes a man in the space of a few years,
there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under
appropriate conditions, a cell may in the course of untold millions of
years give origin to the human race."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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