Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/122

 which must be added the effects of hereditary endowment from a long line of ancestors occupying other and changing environments, to all of which these ancestors must have been structurally adapted. The word "environment" is a term of the most comprehensive kind, embodying, in every case that it is used, an assemblage of conditions presenting an amount of complexity that is not only inconceivable but wholly unnamable. It is nothing less than amazing to find a man at this time of day seeking to argue that environments can not "be the cause of the diversifications of species," on such grounds as that different species flourish in "parts of South Africa and Australia which are wonderfully similar in their soil and climate." Indeed, not to prolong the discussion of nonsense, I will conclude this part of my reply by quoting the sentence with which he concludes his statement of this particular "fallacy of evolution." I do so because, while he appears to think that the question is of so unanswerable a character as to deserve the place of anti-climax in his argument, it really presents as good an example as could anywhere be found of misconception blatant. Here it is: "And then, what is to be said for the multitude of species to be found in the same localities, the same forests, the same jungles, the same lakes, the same streamlets, where there is literally no room for any difference in the environments at all?"

After an exposé, of ignorance so crass I do not think that I should be performing any useful function by following the writer any further in his luckless flounderings. The rest of his article consists in a trite statement of the facts that species are not producible by artificial selection, and that some specific forms have remained unchanged through long geological epochs—neither of which facts has the smallest tendency to negative the doctrine of descent.

He also devotes a page or two to sustain the theory that the lake dwellers and other prehistoric men were the "degraded descendants of a civilized ancestry." Of course, in so doing he has no facts to adduce—merely maintaining that "it is just as possible, just as likely, that the artificers in stone, and the dwellers in the caves of the earth, were the degraded descendants of a civilized ancestry, as the barbarous ancestors of a civilized posterity"—forgetting, on the one hand, that, if the general theory of evolution be true, this is not so possible or not so likely; and, on the other hand, that it is a very unfortunate fact for the possibility and the likelihood in question that the "civilized ancestry" should have been so much less fortunate in leaving behind them relics of then-existence than have been their "barbarous posterity." Next, he treats of "the distinction and equable distribution of the sexes." This is, indeed, a subject which the theory of evolution has not yet been successful in completely explaining; but our author, by again displaying his ignorance of Mr. Darwin's writings, has not made so strong a case as he might have made. He appears to think it self-evident that over such things "the struggle for