THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH--MAKING A HOME FOR LIFE--THE FIRST LIVING
CREATURES
§ 1
The Evolution-idea is a master-key that opens many doors. It is a
luminous interpretation of the world, throwing the light of the past
upon the present. Everything is seen to be an antiquity, with a history
behind it--a _natural history_, which enables us to understand in some
measure how it has come to be as it is. We cannot say more than
"understand in some measure," for while the _fact_ of evolution is
certain, we are only beginning to discern the _factors_ that have been
at work.
The evolution-idea is very old, going back to some of the Greek
philosophers, but it is only in modern times that it has become an
essential part of our mental equipment. It is now an everyday
intellectual tool. It was applied to the origin of the solar system and
to the making of the earth before it was applied to plants and animals;
it was extended from these to man himself; it spread to language, to
folk-ways, to institutions. Within recent years the evolution-idea has
been applied to the chemical elements, for it appears that uranium may
change into radium, that radium may produce helium, and that lead is the
final stable result when the changes of uranium are complete. Perhaps
all the elements may be the outcome of an inorganic evolution. Not less
important is the extension of the evolution-idea to the world within as
well as to the world without. For alongside of the evolution of bodies
and brains is the evolution of feelings and emotions, ideas and
imagination.
Organic evolution means that the present is the child of the past and
the parent of the future. It is not a power or a principle; it is a
process--a process of becoming. It means that the present-day animals
and plants and all the subtle inter-relations between them have arisen
in a natural knowable way from a preceding state of affairs on the whole
somewhat simpler, and that again from forms and inter-relations simpler
still, and so on backwards and backwards for millions of years till we
lose all clues in the thick mist that hangs over life's beginnings.
Our solar system was once represented by a nebula of some sort, and we
may speak of the evolution of the sun and the planets. But since it has
been _the same material throughout_ that has changed in its distribution
and forms, it might be clearer to use some word like genesis. Similarly,
our human institutions were once very different from what they are now,
and we may speak of the evolution of government or of cities. But Man
works with a purpose, with ideas and ideals in some measure controlling
his actions and guiding his achievements, so that it is probably clearer
to keep the good old word history for all processes of social becoming
in which man has been a conscious agent. Now between the genesis of the
solar system and the history of civilisation there comes the vast
process of organic evolution. The word development should be kept for
the becoming of the individual, the chick out of the egg, for instance.
Organic evolution is a continuous natural process of racial change, by
successive steps in a definite direction, whereby distinctively new
individualities arise, take root, and flourish, sometimes alongside of,
and sometimes, sooner or later, in place of, the originative stock. Our
domesticated breeds of pigeons and poultry are the results of
evolutionary change whose origins are still with us in the Rock Dove and
the Jungle Fowl; but in most cases in Wild Nature the ancestral stocks
of present-day forms are long since extinct, and in many cases they are
unknown. Evolution is a long process of coming and going, appearing and
disappearing, a long-drawn-out sublime process like a great piece of
music.
[Illustration: _Photo: Rischgitz Collection._