Marshall J. Gauvin

“ There is no man of science living who believes in special creation. Every university now teaches evolution.
Every science studies its facts to-day, in the light of growth and change from simplicity to complexity. The astronomer traces the course of evolution in the heavens; the geologist follows the path of evolution in the crust of the earth; the biologist threads the process of growth through succeeding forms of life; the psychologist considers the gradual emergence of mind from the lowly animal to civilized man ”

“ And with millions of ages in which to try every experiment, to test every detail, to destroy her failures and seek success along other lines, Nature was bound to reach our day with an array of living creatures of finer development than those that perished in the struggles of the vanished years.
The laws in accordance with which the humbler creatures have been developed from still lower forms have presided over the evolution of man from the beast; and, never pausing in their action, these forces have slowly fashioned the glories of civilization from the dark crudity of savage thought. ”

“ Not only do we know that a creating God is a mere guess; that he is unthinkable in quantity or quality, that he bears no conceivable mark of reality; not only do we know that the creation of a universe out of nothing is wholly unintelligible; but the evidence of astronomy points clearly to the conclusion that our planet has been evolved by condensation from a nebula—from the raw material of which worlds are made; the evidence of geology portrays the fact that the earth has become what it is through a process of continuous change covering many millions of years ”

“ Every phase of existence and life and thought opens its treasury of secrets when touched by evolution’s master key. Where all the facts point resistlessly to one conclusion, that conclusion must perforce be accepted as true. ”

“ The desert has been made to blossom like the rose; cities of solid masonry have arisen from the noisome swamp; industries supplying a thousand human wants now occupy the sites where wild beasts once filled the jungle with their savage roars; the ocean, earth and air have yielded to the conquering power of thought; invention, art, discovery, have tapped exhaustless stores of wealth and culture ”

“ In the struggle for existence the animals possessing these attributes in superior form will survive while those in which they are less developed must perish.
Harmless creatures, no less than harmful, survive through favorable characters—some by the wit with which they elude the pursuer, some by flight, some by protective coloration; like the hare whose summer coat resembles the ground and whose winter garment rivals the whiteness of the snow, and the gorgeous butterfly, whose folded wings are a perfect simulation of the form and color of a dead leaf. ”

“ Mark that while the brains of the apes differ from one another, there is also a striking difference between the brain of the savage and that of the civilized man. Observe, too, how wonderfully these ape brains resemble the human brains, not alone in general form, but also in the number and depth of their convolutions. In fact, the brains of man-like apes and men consist of the same parts—the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the corpus callosum, and the hippocampus minor—and in both anthropoid and man the cortex of the brain is folded in essentially the same convolutions. ”

“ Fig. 2.—The Great Spiral Nebula.
[Pg 18] Not creation, then, but evolution, is the secret of the world’s infinite diversity of things. Nothing was made; everything has grown. Perfection is not at the beginning, but at the end of nature’s efforts. All things have been fashioned by a process of endless transformation—blind, boundless, staggering, stumbling—at times falling back, but on the whole moving forward, pressed by the relentless forces inherent in substance and shaped in accordance with immutable law. ”

“ In the Cro-Magnons evolution had at last produced a race of real men—men with well moulded heads, with large, competent brains, with a straight facial angle, with well formed jaws and teeth and chin, with manly eyes looking out beneath an intellectual brow and lighting up a face whose whole contour was rugged but thoroughly human. ”

“ A new nebula had been given to the universe, not, however, on the night when its light was first seen, but when Napoleon was dazzling the world with his victories; for the glowing mass was 500 billion miles away, and its messenger light, flying across space with the awful velocity of 186,000 miles a second, had been hurrying ninety-nine years to bring the news to our world! ”

“ Evolution is as firmly established to-day as the fact of gravitation. The intellect of the whole world acclaims it as the one and only principle that explains the phenomena of existence. True it is, that many naturalists disagree with Darwin with respect to some of the details of the process by which evolution has been brought about, but these men are one and all thoroughgoing evolutionists. ”

“ In one of these creation myths, regarded as of divine authority because it is found in the Bible, we are naively told that the world with its myriad forms of life and the star-studded universe beyond, were created in six days; and as this childish story is inseparably interwoven with popular religious notions, millions still regard it as sacredly true.
But this is an age of science, of a growing knowledge of reality. During the last few generations, the facts of nature have been studied as they never were studied before. ”

“ Among those who hold that the evolution of life is still one of the ordinary processes of Nature’s day’s work may be mentioned Professor Benjamin Moore, F.R.S., whose views are set forth in his excellent little work, “The Origin and Nature of Life.”
All living things, from the blade of grass to the giant oak, from the worm to the philosopher, are composed of cells, and all cells are composed of protoplasm. Protoplasm is, therefore, the physical basis of life. ”

“ Man, Nature’s gifted son, is Nature’s conqueror! Let him then learn the means by which to further improve his life. Let him equip his mind with truth. Let him solve his problems in the light of knowledge and enjoy a rational existence in a well ordered world. ”

“ Now, if living things have developed in an increasing variety of forms as time has gone on, and if the stratified rocks of the earth’s crust, as they have grown from age to age, have kept a record of these living things, these testimonies of the rocks must prove the gradual unfoldment of the world’s life. Such precisely is the case. The earlier rocks are poor in fossils, because in the earlier ages the world was poor in life; but in the succeeding rocks, there is a larger deposit of fossils; and the rocks of every progressively later age show an ever increasing wealth of fossil remains. ”

“ Science now warrants a further step—one which reveals the origin and nature of matter—the ultimate source of the nebula itself.
Ether fills all space. It penetrates even the most solid substances. The universe of matter swims in an ocean of ether. Only by the presence of ether is the force of gravitation made possible—it must have ether upon which to act. The wings of ether alone transmit to us the light of the sun and stars. ”

“ All life is one, and by the same means its varied ends have been attained. By breeding from those creatures whose qualifications enabled them to survive in their environment, Nature, without knowing why, selected the fittest to become the parents of the creatures that were to follow. Thus, of necessity, the life of the world, ever branching into an increasing diversity of species, gradually improved in form, function and intelligence. ”

“ In these changes that have succeeded one another in the lapse of the innumerable ages, countless species of animals and plants have been [Pg 113] exterminated altogether; of others, only a few hardy or otherwise adapted specimens have survived; from these have been bred the animals and plants of the succeeding ages, which, in turn, have had to adapt themselves to their environment or disappear; and everywhere the struggle, whether with the environment or with other living things, has resulted in the survival of the fittest and the slow improvement of the fauna and the flora of the world. ”

“ As the nebula revolved in one direction, mathematical necessity imparted to all the forming bodies a whirling motion around the central sphere. The smaller bodies cooled rapidly, so to speak, and crusted over; but the sun, owing to his immense bulk, has continued to glow through all these countless ages, and still sends forth enough light and heat to illuminate and warm many billions of worlds like ours. How long a time has elapsed since the earth began to condense from the nebula, the human mind cannot conceive ”

“ Man could do things; the gods could do things too. Man could build a home; the gods could build a world. So reasoned our primitive fathers. Of this reasoning were born the creation stories of the ancient religions; and these stories, coming down to our day, have fixed the beliefs of countless generations of men. ”

“ The truth of this wonderful story of evolution, of the progressive improvement of living forms with the advance of time, is proved by several lines of evidence. One of these lines of evidence is found in the fossil remains of the life of earlier times. Fossils are relics of forms that lived in the long ago. Dying, they were buried in sediment by the hand of time, and to-day they are found in rock formations, where they have been preserved from the destructive power of the ages. ”

“ Organisms that could feed on inorganic matter assumed a stationary character and became the ancestors of the plants. Creatures that required organic food developed powers of locomotion to facilitate the search for sustenance, and of these were born the varied forms of earth’s animal population. From the first microscopic plants, vegetable life proceeded to seaweed, to mosses, to ferns, to the pine and the yew, to the vines, the fruit-bearing and flowering plants that crowd the forests and beautify the gardens of the world. ”

“ Slowly, under the urge of Nature, rapidly in the hands of man, it shapes itself into new moulds. A problem in mathematics is known to be solved when it can be proved. In like manner, evolution is known to be certainly true, since, by following its laws, man now brings into the world new species of animals and plants that did not exist before. ”

“ Now science is telling us that this indispensable ether, this infinitely attenuated and invisible substance, is the birthplace of matter—that atoms of matter are composed of minute centres of energy, or electrons, in ether. The atom is built of thousands of electrons whirling with inconceivable velocity in the space of their tiny, invisible universe; just as the visible universe is composed of myriads of suns and planets rushing forward through the boundless etherial ocean. Matter, then, whether nebulous or solid, was evolved out of the ether. ”

“ And while all these creatures are like human beings in the formation of their skeletons, in their anatomical structure, and in their physiological functioning, each of them approaches more closely to man than any of the others in the development of some part of its body. Thus, “the orang approaches closest to man in the formation of the brain, the chimpanzee in the shape of the spine and in certain characteristics of the skull, the gorilla in the development of the feet and in size, and the gibbon in the formation of the throat and teeth.” ”

“ Every human being carries the rudiment of an ancestral tail, the coccyx, at the base of his spine. In the human embryo, the very muscles for wagging this tail are still found. In adult man, these muscles are represented, as a rule, by bands of fibrous tissue. Occasionally, however, the dissecting surgeon finds these muscles well developed in the body of a man or woman. Science says that evolution alone can explain this lingering relic of a tail, with its attendant muscles, in the human body. ”

“ Gods were in the wind and rain, in the flood and flame, in the roar of the thunder and the echo of the forest gorge, in the harvest that sustained and the disease that destroyed—in everything that helped or hurt the sons of men. ”

“ It is clear, therefore, that if all these eggs produced fishes, and if these reached maturity and in their turn multiplied with such lavish prodigality, a few generations would suffice to transform the ocean into a solid mass.
The same phenomenon obtains in the plant world. Every plant gives its seeds to the soil as Autumn’s spendthrift hand gives its withered leaves to the wind, but of the millions of seeds thus scattered, comparatively few take root and mature and reproduce their kind. ”