Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/330

326 of the sentiment that lies back of the statute against the teaching of evolution, please consider the facts that I shall now present to you. First, as to the animals to which evolutionists would have us trace our ancestry. The following is Darwin's family tree, as you will find it set forth on pages 180-181 of his "Descent of Man":

"The most ancient progenitors in the kingdom of Vertebrata, at which we are able to obtain an obscure glance, apparently consisted of a group of marine animals, resembling the larvae of existing ascidians. These animals probably gave rise to a group of fishes, as lowly organized as the lancelot; and from these the Ganoids, and other fishes like the Lenpidosiren, must have been developed. From such fish a very small advance would carry us on to the amphibians. We have seen that birds and reptiles were once intimately connected together; and the Monotremata now connect mammals with reptiles in a slight degree. But no one can at present say by what line of descent the three higher and related classes, namely, mammals, birds and reptiles, were derived from the two lower vertebrate classes, namely, amphibians and fishes. In the class of mammals the steps are not difficult to conceive which led from the ancient Monotremata to the ancient Marsupials; and from these to the early progenitors of the placental mammals. We may thus ascend to the Lemuridae; and the interval is not very wide from these to the Simiadae. The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter, at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded. Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but, not, it may be said, of noble quality." (Ed. 1874, Hurst.)

Note the words implying uncertainty; "obscure glance," "apparently," "resembling," "must have been," "slight degree," and "conceive."

Darwin, on page 171 of the same book, tries to locate his first man—that is, the first man to come down out of the trees—in Africa. After leaving man in company with gorillas and chimpanzees, he says, "But it is useless to speculate on this subject." If he had only thought of this earlier the world might have been spared much of the speculation that his brute hypothesis has excited.

On page 79 Darwin gives some fanciful reasons for believing that man is more likely to have descended from the chimpanzee than from the gorilla. His speculations are an excellent illustration of the effect that the evolutionary hypothesis has in cultivating the imagination. Prof. J. Arthur Thomson says that the "idea of evolution is the most potent thought economizing formula the world has yet known." It is more than that; it dispenses with thinking entirely and relies on the imagination.

On page 141 Darwin attempts to trace the mind of man back to the mind of lower animals. On pages 113 and 114 he endeavors to trace man’s moral nature back to the anmals. It is all animal, animal, animal, with never a thought of God or of religion.

Our first indictment against evolution is that it disputes the truth of the Bible account of man's creation and shakes faith in the Bible as the Word of God. This indictment we prove by comparing the processes described as evolutionary with the text of Genesis. It not only contradicts the Mosaic record as to the beginning of human life, but it disputes the Bible doctrine of reproduction according to kind—the greatest scientific principle known.

Our second indictment is that the evolutionary hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion, disputes every vital truth of the Bible. Its tendency, natural, if not inevitable, is to lead those who really accept it, first to agnosticism and then to atheism. Evolutionists attack the truth of the Bible, not openly at first, but by using weazel-words like "poetical," "symbolical" and "