Charles Darwin _Frontispiece_
Fig. 1.—The Great Nebula in Orion 15
Fig. 2.—The Great Spiral Nebula 17
Fig. 3.—An Elongated Irregular Nebula 19
Fig. 4.—Lunar Craters: Hyginus and Albategnius 21
Fig. 5.—The Cluster in Hercules 23
Fig. 6.—A Pillar of Stratified Rocks 25
Fig. 7.—Segmentation of the Fertilized Ovum and Gastrulation 27
Fig. 8.—Cambrian Fossils and Upper Silurian Fossils 29
Fig. 9.—The Amphioxus 31
Fig. 10.—The Earliest Known Form of Fish and
Three Other Early Forms of Fishes 33
Fig. 11.—Lampreys—The Mouth of a Lamprey 35
Fig. 12.—Lung Fishes 37
Fig. 13.—The Flying Fish 39
Fig. 14.—The Climbing Perch 41
Fig. 15.—The Evolution of the Frog 43
Fig. 16.—The Head of the Famous Archaegosaurus 45
Fig. 17.—The Ceratosaurus 47
Fig. 18.—The Archaeopteryx 49
Fig. 19.—The Duck-bill, known in Australia as the Platypus 51
Fig. 20.—A Kangaroo with her Young One in her Pouch 53
Fig. 21.—The Pariasaurus Baini 55
Fig. 22.—The Ring-tailed Lemur of Madagascar 57
Fig. 23.—The Slow Loris—another type of Lemur 59
Fig. 24.—The Baboon 61
Fig. 25.—The White-handed Gibbon 63
Fig. 26.—A Female Gorilla 65
Fig. 27.—Male Giant Gorilla 67
Fig. 28.—The Baldheaded Chimpanzee 69
Fig. 29.—The Skeleton of Man and of the Four Anthropoid Apes 71
Fig. 30.—Skull of the Fossil Ape-man of Java 73
Fig. 31.—A Restoration of the Neanderthal Man 75
Fig. 32.—Evolution of the Proboscidea 77
Fig. 33.—Eohippus, the “Dawn Horse,” from the Lower Eocene Rocks 79
Fig. 34.—Fossil Antlers 81
Fig. 35.—Antlers of One Deer at Different Stages of Their
Development 83
Fig. 36.—Embryos of Four Mammals 85
Fig. 37.—Tail of a Six-Months-old Boy 87
Fig. 38.—The Vermiform Appendix in the Orang,
in Man, and in the Human Foetus 89
Fig. 39.—The Rudimentary Muscles of the Ear 91
Fig. 40.—Hair Tracts on Arms of Man and Ape 93
Fig. 41.—The Head of Miss Julia Pastrana 95
Fig. 42.—The Brains of Anthropoid Apes and Men 99
Fig. 43.—Joe and Sallie at Home 103
Fig. 44.—The Genealogical Tree of Humanity 107
Fig. 45.—Two Pigs 111
Fig. 46.—Dogs 115
Fig. 47.—Pigeons 117
_The Illustrated Story of Evolution_
Our fathers, many ages ago, looked out upon the world with mingled
feelings of reverence and fear. They saw the sun that dazzled their
eyes with the brightness of his beams as he flamed his way across the
path of day; they saw the white light of the moon, hung like a spirit
lamp amid the clouds that sailed over the face of night; they saw
the stars, now spangling the darkness with the glory of their sheen,
now veiling their faces with the sable void; they saw the infinite
variety of plants, the animals of every size and form; they saw man
himself, the master of the earth; and they would know something of
the mighty scheme. They did not dream of natural law, but they were
curious. Destitute of science, they were full of wonder. What could be
the driving power back of what they saw? Existence was a challenge.
They must essay an explanation. Their minds refused to rest content in
ignorance. They must know how things came to be.
It was the age of gods. 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. 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.
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. As a result of this study, nature
has yielded to man’s inquiring mind a growing knowledge of her methods.
This knowledge is now accepted by the educated world as the science of
evolution.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.—THE GREAT NEBULA IN ORION.
This illustration and the four that follow are reprinted from Sir
Robert Stawell Ball’s “The Earth’s Beginning,” with acknowledgments to
Cassel & Co., London, and D. Appleton & Co., New York.]
We can imagine only two ways by which the world and its forms of life
came into existence. One is to suppose that all things were created
out of nothing, and made perfect at once, by a being of infinite power
and intelligence who never had beginning. That is the biblical, the
miraculous, the supernatural way. The other is to suppose that the raw
material always existed, and that all things have been developed from
primitive origins, the higher forms gradually emerging by evolution out
of the lower. That is the scientific, the natural way. The first view
is an assumption utterly devoid of support. The evidence proves that
nothing was made, that things have grown.
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; and the evidence of botany and of biology, studied
in living forms and in fossil remains, proves conclusively that the
plants and animals of the world have acquired their present character
and mould as a result of infinite variations from and improvements upon
the first simple forms of life that arose in the primeval world.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.—THE GREAT SPIRAL NEBULA.]
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. Such
a process has covered the earth with its amazing display of vegetation,
and with its strange and wondrous population of things that swim and
creep and fly and run.
In sketching the story of evolution, as that story is revealed to us by
science, let us begin with the evolution of the starry heavens, that we
may learn how the world was born.
As the giant telescope sweeps the abysmal depths of space over a
distance of at least 4,000 billion miles, it reveals here and there
among the hundred million stars, vast patches of cloud-like material.
This material is called nebula, and it is the original substance of
which all suns and planets are made. One hundred and twenty thousand of
these nebulæ come within the range of the great Crossley Reflector at
the Lick Observatory. The telescope photographs the nebula—celestial
photography is one of the most interesting and instructive branches of
modern astronomy—and when you look at a picture of a nebula, you see
an actual photograph of an object that marks the beginning of Nature’s
work.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.—AN ELONGATED IRREGULAR NEBULA.]
According to Sir Robert Stawell Ball, the nebula in Orion (Fig. 1), one
of the most beautiful objects revealed by the telescope, covers an area
more than a million times larger than that occupied by our entire solar
system. Many of the nebulæ are of the spiral form, which shows their
whirling motion. To the astronomer, the Great Spiral Nebula (Fig. 2)
represents a mighty sun and system of planets in process of formation.
Fig. 3 shows an elongated, irregular nebula, from the Constellation
Cygnus. This sketchy streak of nebulous material, although it is still
many millions of miles wide, is but the remaining thread of a once
mighty nebula that has condensed and is still condensing into the
surrounding stars.
The nebulæ represent various stages of evolution into suns and worlds.
Some resemble great clouds of rarified matter; some are distinctly
spiral in form; some show advanced condensation into stars with
attendant planetary systems. The stars, too, exhibit various degrees of
progress from their birth in the nebula. Some are white, which shows
that they are young; some are yellow, which indicates that they have
reached middle age; some are red, which is the mark of their declining
years.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.—LUNAR CRATERS: HYGINUS AND ALBATEGNIUS.]
So the stars, the glowing suns, grow old and die, and, lifeless, wheel
in space, like mighty cinders cold and dark, reflecting, like the moon,
the light that shines on them from brilliant orbs.
The moon (Fig. 4) is a dead star. Its light and heat are gone. It
wheels in space, an extinct cinder, and by the borrowed light which
enables us to see the craters on its surface, it prophesies for us the
fate that one day will overtake the earth. But that will be millions of
years from now; so we need not worry!
But how is the nebula formed? The cluster in the constellation Hercules
(Fig. 5), if it is not in fact a colossal nebula, shows that some of
the stars are very close together. Now, these immense objects, that in
blind fury dash through space, may come into collision with one another
and explode into a nebulous cloud; or they may plough through dense
swarms of meteorites, with a resultant explosion on a smaller scale;
or, torn by internal convulsions, they may burst into fragments and
scatter their dead dust over the abyss of space. In one or all of these
ways the nebula is born, to begin again the recurring cycle of Nature’s
life.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.—THE CLUSTER IN HERCULES.]
Is there further evidence of this? There is. On the night of February
21, in the year 1901, a luminous object appeared in the constellation
Perseus. From a region where all was darkness the night before, a
new and wondrous body now blazed forth its treasures of light. To
the astronomers, who with lively curiosity watched the new birth for
months, it meant that a tremendous conflagration had taken place in the
heavens. 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!
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. 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.
[Illustration: GENERAL TABLE OF THE STRATIFIED SYSTEM AND FORMATIONS,
ETC.