Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/124

114 in the present; his creation of species with his creation of individuals. According to special creation, forms of life are produced by the will of God; having, indeed, the minutest analogies to one another, and yet having no relation to one another. According to evolution, species are not merely created by God, but created by him according to a method which relates each species with the rest, and explains their analogies, like family likenesses, by a common ancestry.

We have purposely stated this in the language of religion, as Mr. Darwin not unfrequently does. But it is a purely scientific question; and Mr. Darwin, we think rightly, afterward expressed his regret at having used "the Pentateuchal term of creation," because of creation, in its strict sense, as ultimate origin, science knows and can know nothing. The question thus becomes one between those who hold and those who deny the immutability of species. The last are commonly spoken of as "Transmutationists"; the former might have been nicknamed "Immutables," but unfortunately they were too often called "Creationists," and the scientific issue was obscured for both parties by theological animus. Hence a belief in God as Creator came to be associated with the denial of transmutation, and a theory of transmutation was supposed to imply a rejection of the Christian creed.

It is really time that the doctrine of "special creations," which some theologians cling to so tenaciously, was held up to the light. Where did it come from? Who invented it? Everybody will at once say, "The schoolmen," because nobody reads the schoolmen, and people have a vague notion that "genus" and "species" are as much a monopoly of the schoolmen as are "entity" and "quiddity." But the schoolmen were transmutationists! They didn't believe in fixity of species any more than they believed in the uniformity of nature. For them the transmutation of plants was as possible as the transmutation of metals. The "reign of law," which is a commonplace with us, was unknown even in the days of Bacon. It is hardly credible to us that Lord Bacon, the father of modern science, as he is called, though he was only a schoolman touched with empiricism, believed not only that one species might pass into another, but that it was a matter of chance what the transmutation would be. Sometimes the mediæval notion of vivification from putrefaction is appealed to, as where he explains the reason why oak-boughs put into the earth send forth wild vines, "which, if it be true (no doubt)," he says, "it is not the oak that turneth into a vine, but the oak bough, putrefying, qualifyeth the earth to put forth a vine of itself." Sometimes he suggests a reason which implies a kind of law, as when he thinks that the stump of a