subserving the same end. Without this law
nature would be a chaotic impossibility. If natural selection were a
real agency, we ought to meet with frequent, if not constant, evidences
of transition, and a slow and gradual, but perceptible improvement in
species, especially marked in those whose generations succeed each other
rapidly. But we see nothing of the kind. But did selection really exist,
it would be incompetent to account for a multitude of structures and
functions to which any efficient cause should be applicable, notably to
the earliest rudiments of useful organs. Such organs as the eye and the
internal ear are quite out of reach of any explanation by natural
selection. Since the development of the eyes, due to the simultaneous
growth of parts from within and without, the organ itself would be
absolutely useless until it had attained such a degree of development as
to admit of these separate parts meeting, and so the principle of
preserving any useful variety would be quite inapplicable. The same is
true of the internal ear.
Dr. Elam next passes in review Haeckel's Geneology of Man from the
Lowest Monera to his Present Station as Lord of Creation. What the
Germans call invention of species to fill troublesome gaps is
illustrated in many ways, but we have room only for a single example:
"The vertebrata must be developed from something, and as yet there has
been no smallest indication of anything like a spine or a rudiment of
anything that could represent or be converted into one. It costs our
author nothing but a stroke of his pen to invent the 'Chordonia,' and
whence did they come? They were developed from the worms by the
formation of a spinal marrow and a _chorda dorsulis_. Nothing more--the
most trifling modification!--and we are at once provided with the root
and stem of the whole vertebrata divisions. It is scarcely any drawback
to this stroke of genius to say that there is no evidence whatever that
such an order of living beings ever existed; that no one has the least
conception of what they were like, or of any of their attributes. Prof.
Huxley's responsibility for this imaginative science is evidenced by his
declaration that the conception of geological time is the only point
upon which he fundamentally and entirely disagrees with Haeckel."
It still remains true that all our positive and direct knowledge as to
species contradicts the evolution hypothesis. Its evidence is purely
inferential, and,
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