Theories of creationism or other wondrous style of the beginning of the earth and its creatures is absolutely extinct! Creationism is declared also to apply to the more complex species in addition to to the species of a genus, and not even Darwin’s strongest critics venture to indicate that the primeval bird, reptile, or fish must have been “specially created.” And this large, this completely unprecedented change in public thought has been the result of the study of one man, and was played about in a mere twenty years! This is the resolve to those who persist in to exert that the “origin of species” was not yet ascertained. We may acknowledge all this, just as we may acknowledge that there are sizeable difficulties in the manner of a full comprehension of the origin and nature of all the parts of the solar system and of the astral universe. But we accredit Darwin as the Newton of natural history, just so surely as we admit that the discovery and presentation by Newton of the law of gravity made order in place of chaos and laid a sure groundwork for all prospective study of the universe, so certainly has Darwin, by his discovery of the law of natural selection and his demonstration of the great rule of the conservation of usable variations in the struggle for existence set up a healthy basis for all future study of nature.
It is important to point out the perspective Darwin took of his own work, and what it was that he alone claimed to have accomplished, the following passage of the introduction to the Origin of Species should be carefully considered. “Although much remains obscure, and will long remain vague, I can hold no doubt, after the most measured and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the view that each species has been independently created, is erroneous. I am fully certain that species are not changeless; but that those belonging to what are named the same genera are lineal descendents of some other and generally extinct species, in the same fashion as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendents of that species. Furthermore, I am positive that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification.”
The artwork by Michelangelo Adam and God attests to the genius egressing in the development of the arts and science.
