Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/120

 of an embryo baby. One of these later plays an important part in connection with hearing. At six months the body is covered with a complete coating of hair which it loses before birth.

All these stages of development can be seen, preserved and are used in the course of instruction in any of the great medical schools of the country. The embryo becomes a human being when it is born.

Evolution never stops from the beginning of the one cell until the human being returns in death to lifeless dust. We wish to set before you evidence of this character in order to stress the importance of the theory of evolution. If the teaching of the theory of evolution in this field is to be excluded by law you will have to find adequate training for your doctors in medical schools outside of your state or you will have to import physicians from Chicago and New York, as the defendant Scopes had to import Mr. Darrow and myself.

We expect to show you how vital to agriculture is the theory of evolution in connection with the development of important varieties of crops, plants, strawberries, peaches and other products essential to the life and prosperity of the people.

We expect to show you how vital is the theory of evolution to geology. We expect to offer you testimony as to the gradual building of the earth, its age and how its age is determined. We expect to show you how by the evolution of the earth's crust it is possible to tell where earthquakes are most likely to occur, so that mankind, for its safety, may have warning.

Much of this learning we hope to set before you will not be found in the Bible, but we maintain that all scientific truth cannot be contained in the Bible since so many truths that we all know about have been discovered since the Bible was written. Moses never heard about steam, electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the aeroplane, farming machinery, and Moses knew nothing about scientific thought and principles from which these vast accomplishments of the inventive genius of mankind have been produced.

The purpose of the defense will be to set before you all available facts and information from every branch of science to aid you in forming an opinion of what evolution is, and of what value to progress and comfort is the theory of evolution, for you are the judges of the law and the facts, and the defense wishes to aid you in every way to intelligent opinion.

The defense denies that it is part of any movement or conspiracy on the part of scientists to destroy the authority of Christianity or the Bible. The defense denies that any such conspiracy exists except in the mind and purposes of the evangelical leader of the prosecution. The defense maintains that the book of Genesis is in part a hymn, in part an allegory and a work of religious interpretations written by men who believed that the earth was flat and whose authority cannot be accepted to control the teachings of science in our schools.

The narrow purpose of the defense is to establish the innocence of the defendant Scopes. The broad purpose of the defense will be to prove that the Bible is a work of religious aspiration and rules of conduct which must be kept in the field of theology.

The defense maintains that there is no more justification for imposing the conflicting views of the Bible on courses of biology than there would be for imposing the views of biologstsbiologists [sic] on courses of comparative religion. We maintain that science and religion embrace two separate and distinct fields of thought and learning.

We remember that Jesus said: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's."