Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/144

140 ment from the egg or anything else—the change of an organism from one set characteristic which characterizes it into a different condition, characterized by a different set of characteristics either structural or functional could be properly called, I think, evolution—to be the evolution of that organism; but the term in general means the whole series of such changes which have taken place during hundreds of millions of years which have produced from lowly beginnings the nature of which is not by any means fully understood to organism of much more complex character, whose structure and functions we are still studying, because we haven't begun to learn what we need to know about them.

Q—Could you briefly sketch what that change is, from inorganic matter on, as far as we know?

A—Well, there must—I can try to do it briefly; you say, including the inorganic?

Q—Yes, starting with the inorganic world.

A—We have all sorts of changes, but leaving that all out of account there has been a tremendous series of changes with the inorganic world by which the universe has been brought into existence and has been molded into its present characteristics. The sun is comparatively young and the earth has gone through a long course of development and change. That is a matter—those two matters are for astronomers and geologists to talk about. I am not an expert in the field of inorganic evolution, although there is a tremendous field of phenomena there, but we are inclined to evolution of living things, of organic evolution, as it is called, we have to conceive of the earliest living things as being able to live upon inorganic food. We have only plants today with that ability. No animal is able to sustain life on the basis of inorganic feed. They have to have other plants and animals to live upon.

Q—Would it bother you for me to interrupt you for one question for the purpose of the record?

A—No, indeed.

Q—Tell us what you mean by organic and inorganic.

A—Organic evolution is connected with living things, organic things are the subject of living bodies, or things that are made by the living activities of those living bodies. There are certain chemicals found in the bodies of living things that are distinguished as against inorganic things which means like rocks and stones and earth.

Q—Minerals?

A—Yes, minerals, and so on.

Q—How do you classify botany, plants?

A—Organic, of course, because they are a part or bodies of living things. Now from the first living things which could live on inorganic substances, there developed a whole series of forms in the plant group gradually becoming more and more complex. ThyThey [sic] make really a remarkably beautiful series as you study them, and this series of increasing complexity in the plants as we find them shown in the rock, the actual plants themselves whose bodies we study in the fossil condition in the rock.

Q—Can you estimate the age of those?

A—Why, no; it takes a chemist to estimate the age of some of these things, for it is a determination of the processes of disintegration in the rock which have been caused largely by chemical forces, aided by the activities of certain bacteria, and I am not an expert in that field, and I would rather not answer.

Q—Could you make any estimate how long from the beginning of organic matter?

A—No, for this reason: I am inclined to believe that there may have been whole series of animals and plants living at certain times upon the earth, which have been completely wiped out, to be succeeded—not completely, but been almost completely wiped out by changes in the earth—to be succeeded by other faunas and floras—other groups of animals and plants reaching development and then in a large measure disappearing. We do not know how