Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/602

584 peculiarities. This is shown most clearly in the keen sense of smell, sight, and hearing, observed in all hunting and pastoral tribes of the highlands and steppe-lands, as well as in the sense of locality and the surprising physical endurance under hunger, thirst, and other privations. . . . The principle of selection prevails in the moral as well as in the physical order. As mankind pressed northward, irrepressible spirits alone could sustain life under the depressing influences of bleak Arctic surroundings. Hence the remarkably cheerful temperament of the Esquimaux, who are also bred to peaceful habits; for peacefully disposed families alone could dwell under a common roof, as the Esquimaux are fain to do in the total absence of fuel. Through overpopulation the Chinese have become the most frugal and industrious of peoples, in recent times emigrating to foreign lands and crowding out all more indolent or pretentious races."

These are but a few examples of the changes which environment can work, in periods of time by no means unlimited. Yet Dr. Porter forbids us to believe that a changing environment, operating through periods of indefinite length, has wrought specific differences. What we know is that in past ages thousands of species have died out and given place to others; and the only question to be settled is whether the connection between successive forms was a genetic one or not. We can conceive the Creator as wiping the slate, so to speak, of his organic creation, and then covering it again with new forms more or less like the former, but having absolutely no connection with them, and as repeating this operation unnumbered times. The trouble with that conception is that it is a little too barren. It might serve for a postulate in theology, but there is no nourishment in it for the human mind. It dispenses with all cause save a formal and hypothetical one; it takes all meaning out of the universe. The world therefore prefers to believe with Darwin that the stream of life has been continuous, and that all existing forms of life have truly issued from those that preceded them; and the world is thankful to Darwin for having done something—nay—much to show how the transitions from form to form may have been accomplished. He may not have solved the problem entirely—it is not pretended that he has; but thoughtful people in general feel more disposed to make the most of the indications he has furnished than to carp at the evidence as not being logically complete.

According to the learned critic, it is owing to a sense of the insufficiency of the evidence afforded by the paleontological record that the evolutionist resorts to the arguments from biology. Here comes in a remarkable bit of writing: "Perhaps it would be more fair to say, if he [the evolutionist] knew how to put his case in the strongest form, that he would urge that experimental proof is not to be looked for, but only indications of a peculiar character." This may be considered a perspicuous style of composition at Yale; but we confess to