f the earth? Are
they permanent and unchanged since the beginning of time, unchanging and
unchangeable at the present? We do not need Herbert Spencer's elaborate
demonstration that this is unthinkable, for we all know from daily
experience that things do change and that nothing is immutable. Did things
have a finite beginning, and have they been "made" by some _supernatural_
force or forces, personified or impersonal, different from those agencies
which we may see in operation at the present time? So says the doctrine of
special creation. Finally, we may ask if things have changed as they now
change under the influence of what we call the natural laws of the
present, and which if they operated in the past would bring the world and
all that is therein to be just what we find now. This is the teaching of
the doctrine of evolution. It is a simple brief statement of natural
order. And because it has followed the method of common sense, science
asserts that changes have taken place, that they are now taking place, and
furthermore that it is unnecessary to appeal to other than everyday
processes for an explanation of the present order of things.

Wherever we look we see evidence of nature's change; every rain that falls
washes the earth from the hills and mountains into the valleys and into
the streams to be transported somewhere else; every wind that blows
produces its small or greater effect upon the face of the earth; the
beating of the ocean's waves upon the shore, the sweep of the great
tides,--these, too, have their transforming power. The geologists tell us
that such natural forces have remodeled and recast the various areas of
the earth and that they account for the present structure of its surface.
These men of science and the astronomers and the physicists tell us that
in some early age the world was not a solid globe, with continents and
oceans on its surface, as now; that it was so very hot as to be semi-fluid
or semi-solid in consistency. They tell us that before this time it was
still more fluid, and even a mass of fiery vapors. The earth's molten bulk
was part of a mass which was still more vast, and which included portions
which have since condensed to form the other bodies of the solar
system,--Mars and Jupiter and Venus and the rest,--while the sun remains as
the still fiery central core of the former nebulous materials, which have
undergone a natural history of change to become the solar system. The
whole sw