FOREWORD
By Henry Fairfield Osborn
In this volume leading biologists of England and America, men distinguished in many special lines of research, are coöperating in a great endeavor to give the full meaning of the word “evolution.” No word in any language at the present time is so comprehensive as this; few words are so misunderstood.
The original import of the word “evolution”—to unfold or to unroll, as a flower is unfolded—is too restricted, because, as theoretically presented in Lloyd Morgan’s doctrine of emergence and as practically proved by palaeontologists in both the invertebrate and the vertebrate world since the time of Waagen, evolution is far more than the unfolding of something that already exists, as the germ develops and unfolds in the beauty of a rose; evolution is the incessant appearance of new qualities, new characters, new powers, new beauties, for which there is no antecedent in experience or no evident promise in the germ itself.
We almost feel the need of returning to the wonderfully adaptive language of the Greeks in an attempt to discover a new word or combination of words which shall better express all the many forms. of activity Nature is now revealing far more clearly than when, in a relatively early and simple state of biologic knowledge, the word evolution was chosen as more appropriate than mutation or transformisme. If from Greek sources a new word could
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