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The Story of Evolution By: Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) |
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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 has
written for those who are not students of science, or whose knowledge
may be confined to one branch of science, and used a plain speech which
assumes no previous knowledge on the reader's part. For the rest, it will be found that no strained effort is made to trace
pedigrees of animals and plants when the material is scanty; that, if on
account of some especial interest disputable or conjectural speculations
are admitted, they are frankly described as such; and that the more
important differences of opinion which actually divide astronomers,
geologists, biologists, and anthropologists are carefully taken into
account and briefly explained... Continue reading book >>
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