D. Kerfoot Shute

“ What is true of the instability of the North American Continent is true of all the continents of the globe. They have all grown from small beginnings to their present huge proportions, and are now undergoing slow but irresistible changes. When these facts are held in mind, one may form a faint conception of the colossal changes that have taken place throughout the sweep of bygone ages. Environment means a complexity of conditions almost infinite in their number and character, and almost infinite in their variations. ”

“ In this great struggle, over which Natural Selection presides as some inexorable, ever-watchful, sharp-eyed task-master, the victory is to the cunning instead of the stupid; the race is to the swift instead of the slow; and the battle is to the strong. The wolves of keenest scent, the tigers of more supple spring and sharper sight, secure their prey and thrive, while the weaker members fail to get their food and starve. ”

“ Bodily structure, moral and intellectual tendencies, disease, vices, and virtues are all in the marvelous stream of heritage that comes to him from the past. “Diseases that no facts in the individual life can account for point gaunt fingers of blame from one generation to another. Not a murderer is hung, not a daughter starts on the downward way, but a great company, like those who were present at the stoning of Stephen, stand by inaugurating and consenting to the ruin.” ”

“ As Dana well says, “The face, with its expressive features, is formed so as to respond not solely to the emotions of pleasure and pain, but to shades of sentiment and interacting sympathies the most varied, high as heaven and low as earth,—ay, lower, in debased human nature; the whole being, body, limbs, and head, with eyes looking, not towards the earth, but beyond an infinite horizon, is a majestic expression of the divine feature in man and of the infinitude of his aspirations.” ”

“ Man, in his individual development from a fertilized ovum, comes from a source infinitely lower than the ape. Why, therefore, should he feel such reluctance to believe that he has passed, during geologic ages, through the phase of generalized simian ancestors? Is there not much more of hope in the knowledge that he has risen higher and higher through the æons of the past than in the belief that he was created an innocent and noble character and then fell to utter wretchedness through great temptation? The motto of evolution is Excelsior. ”

“ As the embryo unfolds, one by one these animal-actors come upon the stage, file past in phantom-like procession, throw off their drapery, and dissolve away into something else. Yet, as they vanish, each leaves behind a vital portion of itself, some original and characteristic memorial, something itself has made or won, that perhaps it alone could make or win,—a bone, a muscle, a ganglion, or a tooth,—to be the inheritance of the race. ”

“ In spite of the fact that great advance in animal life was made during Carboniferous times, there was little of the life in those ancient woods that we associate with the forests of the present; they were gloomy wastes of shade, without the presence of bright flowers, no humming of the bees, no song of birds, and few sounds save the gurgling of running streams, the sighing of the wind through the leaves, the splash of waves upon the shore, and the bursting of the thunder clouds. ”

“ Man has in his structure the indelible impress of the handiwork of these lowly relatives. Upon him, as upon them, and upon all living creatures, the forces of heredity and variation, of use and disuse, of environment and Natural Selection, have been and are perpetually playing, evolving him in one direction and innumerable creatures in other directions.
The goal of evolution seems to be men with Great Minds of High Character. There is nothing great in the world but man, nothing great in man but mind, and nothing great in mind but character. ”

“ In consequence of the wonderful nutritive activities of cells, we may well speak of them as marvelous magicians. Hertwig, following Haeckel, speaks of many cells as being builders. In the same spirit, we can say that multitudes of cells are expert chemists, artists, sculptors, mathematicians, and so on, in that they make all the myriad chemical products of organic nature, such as spices, pigments, sugars, starches, acids, perfumes, and numerous other substances; they paint in colors that rival the hues of the rainbow; they construct all of the beautiful forms in the animal and plant worlds ”

“ Truly has it been said that the past is at work in the present, its powers reaching down through the ages, to all the race, largely molding every human life, touching and influencing every individual’s thought and will, and, more than any other force, coloring history. ”

“ It is extremely difficult to realize the variety, wealth, and grandeur of animal and plant life as they exist on the globe to-day. Even if we endeavor to recall, in imagination, all that we have seen in streams and woodland, in ponds and rivers, in meadows, and in the air ”

“ The insect rests motionless among the bright green foliage, being very conspicuous on account of its pink color, and looking so much like a flower that it allures and captures the butterflies which settle upon it. ”

“ When society takes away from the criminal his personal liberty and places him in an environment that theoretically reforms him and protects itself, why does it not take cognizance of the fact that its theories are often woful failures in practice? The criminal is often not reformed and he gets into the category of habitual offenders; but society permits him, during his intervals of freedom, to procreate [224] his kind and send his polluted cargoes of vicious heritages to helpless offspring. Is this humanity to these offspring? ”

“ As far as anatomy and physiology alone can reveal, it is the result of millions of cells acting together that makes possible the existence of such a living, sentient, thinking creature as man or the highly intelligent elephant or any other multicellular animal. It is due to the mysterious powers of protoplasm that one little microscopic cell, like the fertilized ovum of a woman, is able to hold all the heritages of the race, and gradually unfold them as it builds up the body into myriads of diverse cells intimately associated together. ”

“ Grant Allen has beautifully written that, “while man has tilled only a few level plains, a few great river-valleys, a few peninsular mountain slopes, leaving the vast mass of earth untouched by his hand, the insect has spread itself over every land in a thousand shapes, and has made the whole flowering creation subservient to his daily wants. ”

“ As far, then, as social customs, morals, and religion are concerned, the average man is, in our opinion, infinitely more the creature of nurture than of nature. But, as far as his temperament, his emotional nature, his judgment, his strength of will, in short, his physical and therefore his mental constitution, are concerned, he is almost absolutely the creature of heredity. The equilibrium of qualities or heritages in the average man, resident in a given, stable community, is in harmony with the average customs, ethical ideas, and religious beliefs of that community. ”

“ These profound truths should lead all, and especially law-makers, to remember that “the man who inherits from his parents an impulsive or easily tempted nature and an inert will and judgment, and commits a crime under the influence of strong emotion, can no more be placed in the same category of responsibility with a man of more favorable constitution and temperament than can a man who steals a loaf under the pangs of starvation with a merchant who commits a forgery to afford him the means of prolonging a guilty career.” ”

“ That an offspring always inherits from its parents many of their characteristics is well known; that it always varies, more or less, from them is also equally well known. Heredity and variation are twin forces that play upon every creature, holding it rigidly true to the parental type or compelling more or less divergence therefrom, according to the strength of the one or other power; so that every creature is the resultant of the activities of these two great parallel forces. Variation is coextensive with heredity, and every living creature gives evidence of the existence of variations. ”

“ The trained eye of the gardener recognizes each hyacinth among hundreds of bulbs; of the shepherd, each sheep in his flock; of the Laplander, each reindeer crowded in his herd like ants on the anthill. In a flock of 1,000 sheep each mother can even recognize a variation in the voice of her own lamb, all alike to us. ”

“ The groups of minute mosaics or cells that make up the bodies of animals and plants differ profoundly from the mosaics that form the figures of the dead Emperor and his companions, inasmuch as each mosaic or cell of the animal or plant body is so small as to require the microscope to reveal it; also [4] each mosaic of the living animal or plant is a living mosaic or cell, in that it can absorb food, digest it, assimilate it, grow, and multiply in numbers. Cells, then, are the morphological or structural units which compose the bodies of all living creatures. ”

“ But in all stable communities there are men whose resultant of heritages, some in one direction and some in another, places them out of harmony with the average of their social environment, and they are looked upon, some as idiots, some as geniuses, some as criminals, and others as saints, and so on. So that again we may say that a man’s character in a community is the resultant of an hereditary physical constitution, and his environment. ”

“ Studies in heredity illustrate most luridly that the continuity of the human race is a terrible but remorseless reality.
If the ignorance and the perverted pleasures of one generation may produce the vices and the crimes and the diseases of another, a question of tremendous import arises: Is heredity as potent in the direction of virtue and health as of vice and disease? At the first look one is almost tempted to answer Nay! for the most striking examples of heredity seem to be in the direction of evil. But this is perfectly natural. Decay is always more [74] rapid than growth. ”

“ Finally, that phase of highest culture which recognizes the law of universal evolution, formulates the [212] view of one continuous creative act, in which every object is still a creation but not a separate creation,—only a separate manifestation of one eternal act of creative energy. The history of creation, which means the same thing as the history of evolution, shows innumerable adaptations which may surely be considered as the work of a cosmos designer. Evolution has profoundly modified our conceptions of design in nature as it has those of creation. ”

“ The complex nucleus of the fertilized ovum may be compared to a modern Italian building which has been constructed of material—a column here, a cornice there, a lintel yonder—gathered from different classic buildings of varying antiquity. In view of the increasing number of ancestral groups of hereditary units that must have accumulated in the nuclei of ova in the course of time, there must necessarily, for mechanical reasons, have arrived a period when these nuclei could receive no more of them by fertilization, unless natural selection should develop some saving device ”

“ A dozen of the black sunbirds may be feeding in this tree, and their notes may be heard among its branches all the day, yet their color adaptation to their environment is so complete that they are seen with the greatest difficulty or are entirely invisible. ”

“ Natural Selection ever carefully watches over these processes, eliminating the unfit variations and selecting the useful ones. Variation, Heredity, Environment, Isolation, and Natural Selection, having been acting and reacting through the ages, have produced, from a common parental stock, all the innumerable divergent and adaptive forms of living creatures that can be traced through the geologic strata to those on the surface of the earth to-day; have produced, therefore, man also as the inflorescence of the topmost branch of the tree of life. ”

“ The individuals must conduct themselves so as not to jeopardize the interests of the family. Thus other interests than those of a purely personal character must influence their actions. And thus, finally, the adumbrations of right and wrong conduct appear, and we now find in the newly-created human species the germs of morality and conscience. As social evolution proceeded, the self-regarding faculties were more and more curtailed, and the other-regarding sentiments were extended with ever-enlarging amplitude. ”

“ It is of vastly greater moment to us that there is a cosmic soul in the universe that makes for righteousness than that this soul is threefold or onefold in its transcendental nature. Also of vastly more moment to us is a belief in this soul than any opinions we may entertain about eating meat on Friday or listening to attractive music on Sunday. ”

“ In order to understand the relation of Ontogeny to Phylogeny, it must be carefully borne in mind that the simple and lowly organized creatures on the globe at the first appearance of life were performing the two great functions that all living creatures perform, viz.: those of nutrition and reproduction. These functions imply that organisms were reacting to environment, and, therefore, undergoing modifications and adaptations; and at the same time the organisms were giving origin to offspring—they were reproducing their kind through heredity. ”

“ The great majority of the eggs of our smaller birds are so spotted or streaked with brown or black on variously tinted grounds, that when lying in the shadow of the nests and surrounded by the many colors and tints of bark and moss, of purple buds and tender green or yellow foliage, with all the complex glittering lights and mottled shades produced among these by the spring sunshine and by the sparkling raindrops, they must have a quite different aspect from that which they possess when we observe them away from their natural surroundings. ”

“ Nor, if one look below the surface, can it be denied of the higher animals and of man. Happily, the average man, with his present constitution, has his diverse heritages so proportioned that we may repeat that his life and character (in customs, morals, and religion) are vastly more influenced by environment than by heredity.
The standards for estimating the life and character of men, namely, human customs, morals, and religions, are such recent acquisitions, geologically speaking, that they have, as yet, very slightly if at all influenced the germ-cells. ”

“ For it shows that the human race, through all the incalculable ages of the past, has risen to higher and higher levels,—to nobler and nobler phases of being. His progress in the almost infinite past suggests the hope that he will mount higher and higher towards perfection during the limitless future. ”