Q. E. D. | Page 2

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 arch?ologist 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, too, it is more than doubtful if any purely academic body could be found willing to become responsible for giving to the world conclusions so contrary to the vogue of the present day.
That these brief