Q. E. D. | Page 2

an
origin essentially different from anything now going on around us.
This indicates the line of argument adopted in the following pages.
The Evolution theory has been widely discussed and accepted in
modern times. Indeed it has had a fair chance and an open field for
several decades. What is the present situation of the controversy? The
friends of the Bible and of old-fashioned Christianity need to know the
real facts of the present situation.
Every now and then the news despatches report that the great Professor
So-and-so has at last really produced life from the not-living, or has
obtained some absolutely new type of life by some wonderful feat of
breeding. Or some geologist or archæologist has discovered in the earth

the missing link which connects the higher forms of life with the lower,
or which bridges over the gulf between man and the apes. Thus many
people who get their "science" through the daily papers really believe
that these long-looked-for proofs of Evolution have at last been
demonstrated, and hence they receive without question the confident
assertions of the camp followers of science published at space rates in
the Sunday supplements that all intelligent men of to-day have long ago
accepted the Evolution doctrine.
But in spite of the quick dissemination of news and the universal spread
of education, it seems but a slow process for the really important
discoveries of modern science to filter down through such media as the
current periodicals to the rank and file of society. The situation seems
to illustrate the old adage that a lie will travel round the world while
truth is getting on her shoes. _Thus it happens that the common people
are still being taught in this second decade of the twentieth century
many things that real scientists outgrew nearly a generation ago, and
assertions are still being bandied around in the individual sciences
which are wholly unwarranted by a general survey of the whole field of
modern natural science_. Indeed, in almost every one of the separate
sciences the arguments upon which the theory of Evolution gained its
popularity a generation or so ago are now known by the various
specialists to have been blunders, or mistakes, or hasty conclusions of
one kind or another. Thus the market value of all the various subsidiary
stocks of the Evolution group has been steadily declining in their
respective home markets, and now stands away below par; while
strange to say the stock of the central holding company itself is still
quoted at fictitiously high figures.
This curious--not to say deplorable--situation has developed largely
because of the modern system of strict specialization in the various
departments of science. Each scientist feels compelled by an unwritten
but rigid code of professional ethics to confine himself strictly to the
cultivation of the little plot of ground on which he happens to be
working, and is forbidden to express an opinion about what he may
know has been discovered on another plot of ground on which his
neighbor is working, except by express permission. In other words,
science teaching has now become strictly a matter of authority, this
authority being vested in the various specialists; and nobody is

permitted to look at it in a broad way, or to frame a general induction
from the sum of all the facts of nature now discovered, under penalty of
scientific excommunication. The scientific code of ethics forbids any
general view of the woods: each man must confine himself to the
observation of the particular tree in front of his own nose.
But these pages have been prepared under the idea that it is high time to
take a more general survey of the geography, time to take our eyes off
the various individual trees, and to look at the woods. Perhaps in some
respects they may be regarded as too technical for ordinary readers. But
if this is the case, it is because the writer had to choose between this
somewhat technical treatment of the subject and the alternative danger
of making loose and inaccurate statements or dealing in glittering
generalities too vague to carry conviction. As it is, the writer is here
trying to give directly to the general public the results of years of
special research in correlating the data from many scattered
departments of science,--results that most scientists would feel obliged
to reserve for the select few of some learned society, to be published
subsequently in the Reports of its "Transactions," and to find their way
after years of delay into the main currents of human thought. But these
dilatory methods of professional pedantry, miscalled "ethics," shall not
longer be allowed to delay the publication of highly important
principles which the public are entitled to know at once, and to know at
first hand. Then,