Sir John William Dawson

“ Even in respect to the question of species, in all the long chain between the Ascidian and the man, he has not certainly established one link; and in the very last change, that from the ape-like ancestor, he equally fails to satisfy us as to matters so trivial as the loss of the hair, which, on the hypothesis, clothed the pre-human back, and on matters so weighty as the dawn of human reason and conscience.
We thus see that evolution as an hypothesis has no basis in experience or in scientific fact, and that its imagined series of transmutations has breaks which cannot be filled. ”

“ The latter perished from the continental plateaus at every upheaval, but climbed again in new hordes and reoccupied the ground after every subsidence. But just as in human history every victory or defeat urges on the progress of events, and develops the great plan of God’s providence in the elevation of man; so here every succeeding change brings in new and higher actors on the stage, and the scheme of creation moves on in a grand and steady progress towards the more varied and elevated life of the Modern World. ”

“ Those who have no faith in evolution as a cause of the production of species, may well ask in return how the evolutionist can prove that creation must be instantaneous, that it must follow no law, that it must produce an animal fully formed, that it must be miraculous. In short, it is a portion of the policy of evolutionists to endeavour to tie down their opponents to a purely gratuitous and ignorant view of creation, and then to attack them in that position. ”

“ One of them is certainly a pine, in form and structure of its wood very like those now living in the southern hemisphere; it is a Dadoxylon. Another is different, its sides rough and gnarled, and marked with huge irregular ridges; its wood loose, porous, and stringy, more like the bark of modern pines, yet having rings of growth and a true bark of its own, and sending forth large branches and roots. It is the strange and mysterious Prototaxites, one of the wonders of the Devonian land, and whose leaves and fruits would be worth their weight in gold in our museums, could we only procure them. ”

“ Nay, more, this power which resides within man rules with omnipotent energy the material organism, driving its nerve forces until cells and fibres are worn out and destroyed, taxing muscles and tendons till they break, impelling its slave the body even to that which will bring injury and death itself. Surely, what we thus see in man must be the image and likeness of the Great Spirit. We can escape from this conclusion only by one or other of two assumptions, either of which is rather to be called a play upon words than a scientific theory. ”

“ Thus practically delivered from the encumbrance of weight, and furnished with long flexible arms provided with suckers, with great eyes and a horny beak, the nautilus becomes one of the tyrants of the deep, creeping on the bottom or swimming on the surface at will, and everywhere preying on whatever animals it can master. Fortunately for us, as well as for the more feeble inhabitants of the sea, the nautili are not of great size, though some of their allies, the cuttle-fishes, which, however, want the floating apparatus, are sufficiently powerful to be formidable to man. ”

“ It presents to us a coarse and filthy savage, repulsive in feature, gross in habits, warring with his fellow-savages, and warring yet more remorselessly with every living thing he could destroy, tearing half-cooked flesh, and cracking marrow-bones with stone hammers, sheltering himself in damp and smoky caves, with no eye heavenward, and with only the first rude beginnings of the most important arts of life. ”

“ Old forms are often gigantic in size in comparison with their modern successors, which, if they could look back on their predecessors, might say, “There were giants in those days.” Some old forms have gone onward in successive stages of elevation by a regular and constant gradation. Others have remained as they were through all the ages, Some have no equals in their groups in modern days. All these things speak of order, but of order along with development, and this development not evolution; unless by this term we understand the emergence into material facts of the plans of the creative mind. ”

“ At the same time, its lower extremities, no longer used for climbing trees, but for walking on the ground, gained in strength and size; its arms diminished; and its development to maturity being delayed by the intensity of the struggle for existence, its brain enlarged, it became more cunning and sagacious, and even learned to use weapons of wood or stone to destroy its victims. So it gradually grew into a fierce and terrible creature, “neither beast nor human,” combining the habits of a bear and the agility of a monkey with some glimmerings of the cunning and resources of a savage. ”

“ The neck was not only long, but massive and powerful, the paddles, four in number, were six or seven feet in length and must have urged the vast bulk of the animal, perhaps forty feet in extent, through the water with prodigious speed. The capacious chest and great ribs show a powerful heart and lungs. Imagine such a creature raising its huge head twelve feet or more out of water, and rushing after its prey, impelled with perhaps the most powerful oars ever possessed by any animal. We may be thankful that such monsters, more terrible than even the fabled sea-serpent, are unknown in our days. ”

“ I do not attach any importance whatever, in this connection, to the likeness in type or plan between man and other mammals. Evolutionists are in the habit of taking for granted that this implies derivation, and of reasoning as if the fact that the human skeleton is constructed on the same principles as that of an ape or a dog, must have some connection with a common ancestry of these animals. This is, however, as is usual with them, begging the question. Creation, as well as evolution, admits of similarity of plan. ”

“ Torrents and avalanches from the hills carry mud and gravel over the plains. Peat bogs accumulate in the hollows. Glaciers heap up confused masses of moraine, and the advancing sea piles up stones and shingle to be imbedded in mud on its further advance, while boreal marine animals invade the now submerged plains. At length the ice and water meet everywhere, or leave only a few green strips where hardy Arctic plants still survive, and a few well-clad animals manage to protract their existence. ”

“ From Sir William Thomson’s calculations, it would appear that the time which has elapsed from the first formation of a solid crust on the earth to the modern period may have been from seventy to one hundred millions of years, and the whole time from the vaporous condition of the solar system to the present, must of course have been still greater than even this enormous series of ages. Such a lapse of time is truly almost inconceivable, but it is only a few days to Him with whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. ”

“ On the contrary, common sense as well as science requires us to believe that species must have originated in those central parts of their distribution where they enjoy the most favourable circumstances, and must have extended themselves thence as far as external conditions would permit. One of the most wretched varieties of the human race, and as near as any to the brutes, is that which inhabits Tierra del Fuego, a country which scarcely affords any of the means for the comfortable sustenance of man. Would it not be absolutely impossible that man should have originated in such a country? ”

“ This is a bold and true assertion of the actual relation of even this modified evolution to rational and practical theism, which requires not merely this God “afar off,” who has set the stone of nature rolling and then turned His back upon it, but a present God, whose will is the law of nature, now as in times past. The evolutionist is really in a position of absolute antagonism to the idea of creation, even when held with all due allowance for the variations of created things within certain limits. ”

“ Thus the remarkable fact comes out, that the uprising land was peopled at first with a more abundant fauna than that which it now sustains, and that many species, and among these some of the largest and most powerful, have been weeded out, either before the advent of man or in the changes which immediately succeeded that event. That in the Post-glacial period so many noble animal species should have been overthrown in the struggle for existence, without leaving any successors, at least in Europe, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of life on our planet. ”

“ Physically, the transition from the Permian to the Trias is easy. In the domain of life a great gulf lies between; and the geologist whose mind is filled with the forms of the Palæozoic period, on rising into the next succeeding beds, feels himself a sort of Rip Van Winkle, who has slept a hundred years and awakes in a new world. The geography of our continents seems indeed to have changed little from the time of the Permian to that next succeeding group which all geologists recognise as the beginning of the Mesozoic or Middle Age of the world’s history, the Triassic period. ”

“ Mivart’s dictum with that noble summary of the whole duty of man, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ According to Mr. Mivart’s definition, the man who loves God and his neighbour, and, out of sheer love and affection for both, does all he can to please them, is nevertheless destitute of a particle of real goodness. ”

“ It is true that many evolutionists, either unwilling to offend, or not perceiving the logical consequences of their own hypothesis, endeavour to steer a middle course, and to maintain that the Creator has proceeded by way of evolution. But the bare, hard logic of Spencer, the greatest English authority on evolution, leaves no place for this compromise, and shows that the theory, carried out to its legitimate consequences, excludes the knowledge of a Creator and the possibility of His work. We have, therefore, to choose between evolution and creation ”

“ Thus all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life is Nature’s investment in club-mosses and the like so long ago. But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding the interest? Heat comes out of it, light comes out of it, and if we could gather together all that goes up the chimney and all that remains in the grate of a thoroughly-burnt coal fire, we should find ourselves in possession of a quantity of carbonic acid, water, ammonia, and mineral matters, exactly equal in weight to the coal. ”

“ It existed, and most naturally, in the oldest philosophy and poetry, in connection with the crudest and most uncritical, attempts of the human mind to grasp the system of nature; but that in our day a system destitute of any shadow of proof, and supported merely by vague analogies and figures of speech, and by the arbitrary and artificial coherence of its own parts, should be accepted as a philosophy, and should find able adherents to string upon its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores of knowledge, is surpassingly strange. ”

“ Limiting ourselves in the first place to theories of evolution, and to these as explaining the origin of species of living beings, and especially of man, we naturally first inquire as to the basis on which they are founded. Now no one pretends that they rest on facts actually observed, for no one has ever observed the production of even one species. ”

“ Vain and without foundation many of these have no doubt been, but they have formed a universal and costly testimony to an instinct of immortality, dimly glimmering even in the breast of the savage, and glowing with higher brightness in the soul of the Christian, but separated by an impassable gulf from anything derivable from a brute ancestry. ”