If, stopping beyond that which may be learned from the facts of the successive appearance of the forms of animal life upon the surface of the globe, in so far as they are yet made known to us by natural science, we apply our reasoning faculties to the task of finding out what those observed facts mean, the present conclusions of the interpreters of Nature appear to be no less directly in conflict with those of the latest interpreter of Genesis.
Mr. Gladstone appears to admit that there is some truth in the doctrine of evolution, and indeed places it under very high patronage:
Has any one ever disputed the contention thus solemnly enunciated that the doctrine of evolution was not invented the day before yesterday? Has any one ever dreamed of claiming it as a modern innovation? Is there any one so ignorant of the history of philosophy as to be unaware that it is one of the forms in which speculation embodied itself long before the time either of the Bishop of Hippo or of the Apostle to the Gentiles? Is Mr. Gladstone, of all people in the world, disposed to ignore the founders of Greek philosophy, to say nothing of Indian sages, to whom evolution was a familiar notion ages before Paul of Tarsus was born? But it is ungrateful to cavil at even the most oblique admission of the possible value of one of those affirmations of natural science which really may be said to be "a demonstrated conclusion and established fact." I note it with pleasure, if only for the purpose of introducing the observation that, if there is any truth whatever in the doctrine of evolution as applied to animals, Mr. Gladstone's gloss on Genesis in the following passage is hardly happy:
God created—
(a) The water-population;
(b) The air-population.
And they receive his benediction (verses 20-23).
6. Pursuing this regular progression from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex, the text now gives us the work of the sixth "day," which supplies the land-population, air and water having been already supplied (pp. 695, 696).
The gloss to which I refer is the assumption that the "air-population" forms a term in the order of progression from lower to higher, from simple to complex—the place of which lies between the water-population below and the land-population above—and I speak of it
the certainty that they existed, which is derived from the occurrence of the wing in the Middle Silurian. In fact, I have stretched a point in admitting that these fossils afford a colorable pretext for the assumption that the land and air population were of contemporaneous origin.
