The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-03-03

ed monkey from the ceiling to hang over his head.
 The beginnings of this famous book were made when the author was on a. long voyage in the ship Beagle, to the South American coast, the Pacific Islands and Australia, during the years 1851 to 1886. But it is extremely in tereSting to note that at the same time, and in entire ignorance of what Darwin was seeking another distin- guished naturalist was on a similar voyage of exploration to the East In dies, the Malay archipelago and the island of Borneo, engaged in studying plant life. This was A. R. Wallace. At a meeting of the Linnean Society in London, in 1858. both men read pa pers on the same theme. wallace's was on the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties and the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties by Natural Selection! Darwin's was almost identical in it's title. Both advocated, in substance, that species are not orig inal and special creations of God, inn mutable, but that they are constantly suffering a change through a process of adaptation by which those varieties of a species that are in any way bet ter fitted for the conditions of life sur vive and multiply at the expense of the others.
 The prime difference between Wal lace and Darwin was this: Wallace denied the application of this law to man, while Darwin included man in his idea. The difference appeared in later years when the theory, which at first seems so simple and unimportant, aroused such profound attention and conflict which now after 50 years has not ended. Many of Darwin's posi- tions as first taken were modified or left by him before he died, and others were vigorously and successfully att tackled by scientific men around the world. Darwin was not directly re- sponsible for the atheistic conclusions which many hastened to draw from his doctrine, although personally he reached a place in his life, where he had lost all interest in religion and poetry and art. The brilliant colors of the peacock's feathers made him sick because they suggested that beauty might have been an end some how in the sum total of things and beauty had no place in his thought world. It was simply a struggle for existence which he saw.
 What was there in the theory of Dar- win that created such a profound dis turbance in the religious world as well as the world of science? It was this: Genesis seemed to teach that God brought them to Adam to name. The cat was made a cat when the world began, the tiger the tiger. But we know that varieties may be artificial ly produced by man. He can com bine things so as to get a. red pond lily. Burbank is a. wizard in creating new varieties all the while. Darwin said that nature could perpetuate varieties and then they would be species ax1d remain fixed. Now Christian theists could have no well founded objection to this by itself. Secondary causes in nature, such as environment, strug- gle. etc, might originate new species and retain them. Variations might continue.
 But it was the differences from the theory that led to discussion. It is
 
 tifically produced and for a. while con- tinue, but that, if left alone, they tend to go back to the original and simple form All roses now in our green houses. if left to themselves, would in time go back to wild roses. All grapes revert to wild grapes. Every garden tends to run out to weeds. Then it was found that by crossing species the resultant life is unfertile or very slightly fertile. Such facts make the acceptance of the Darwinian theory difficult, and no one perceived it more than Darwin himself. What did he say? He took refuge in enormous stretches of time. He thought in his first edi- ton that three hundred million years might be fairly demanded for the ex- istence of life so that very slight var iations, such as we all see between parent and child, would have time to be fixed. From this he retreated later. Then it was admitted that no example of the creation of a really new species is now or ever has been seen of man. No missing link has been found. We go back to the monuments of Egypt and the almond eyes of the inhabitants of the land of Pharohs are just as marked as today. The thick lips of the negro are the same 5000 years ago as today. You might as we'll expect the sands of the desert to produce the pyramids as any one spec ies to produce another in our age. We see nothing passing the line from one to another, from vertebrate to man or from invertebrate to vertebrate. We see no passing of mineral into plant or plant into animal. So immense time was asked for to allow the changes which the idea demanded. The next topic discussed in this ser mon was evolution.