The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of Evolution, by Joseph McCabe

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Story of Evolution

Author: Joseph McCabe

Posting Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #1043]
Release Date: September, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF EVOLUTION ***

Produced by Dianne Bean

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