The Story of Evolution | Page 3

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This etext was scanned with OmniPage Pro OCR software donated by
Caere by Dianne Bean, Chino Valley, AZ. from a 1921 edition.

THE STORY OF EVOLUTION BY JOSEPH McCABE
1912

PREFACE
An ingenious student of science once entertained his generation with a
theory of how one might behold again all the stirring chapters that
make up the story of the earth. The living scene of our time is lit by the
light of the sun, and for every few rays that enter the human eye, and
convey the image of it to the human mind, great floods of the reflected
light pour out, swiftly and indefinitely, into space. Imagine, then, a man
moving out into space more rapidly than light, his face turned toward
the earth. Flashing through the void at, let us say, a million miles a
second, he would (if we can overlook the dispersion of the rays of light)

overtake in succession the light that fell on the French Revolution, the
Reformation, the Norman Conquest, and the faces of the ancient
empires. He would read, in reverse order, the living history of man and
whatever lay before the coming of man.
Few thought, as they smiled over this fairy tale of science, that some
such panoramic survey of the story of the earth, and even of the
heavens, might one day be made in a leisure hour by ordinary mortals;
that in the soil on which they trod were surer records of the past than in
its doubtful literary remains, and in the deeper rocks were records that
dimly lit a vast abyss of time of which they never dreamed. It is the
supreme achievement of modern science to have discovered and
deciphered these records. The picture of the past which they afford is,
on the whole, an outline sketch. Here and there the details, the colour,
the light and shade, may be added; but the greater part of the canvas is
left to the more skilful hand of a future generation, and even the broad
lines are at times uncertain. Yet each age would know how far its
scientific men have advanced in constructing that picture of the growth
of the heavens and the earth, and the aim of the present volume is to
give, in clear and plain language, as full an account of the story as the
present condition of our knowledge and the limits of the volume will
allow. The author has been for many years interested in the evolution of
things, or the way in which suns and atoms, fishes and flowers, hills
and elephants, even man and his institutions, came to be what they are.
Lecturing and writing on one or other phase of the subject have,
moreover, taught him a language which the inexpert seem to
understand, although he is not content merely to give a superficial
description of the past inhabitants of the earth.
The particular features which, it is hoped, may give the book a
distinctive place in the large literature of evolution are, first, that it
includes the many evolutionary discoveries of the last few years,
gathers its material from the score of sciences which confine
themselves to separate aspects of the universe, and blends all these
facts and discoveries in a more or less continuous chronicle of the life
of the heavens and the earth. Then the author has endeavoured to show,
not merely how, but why, scene succeeds scene in the chronicle of the
earth, and life slowly climbs from level to level. He has taken nature in
the past as we find it to-day: an interconnected whole, in which the

changes of land and sea, of heat and cold, of swamp and hill, are
faithfully reflected in the forms of its living population. And, finally, he