Evolution: An Investigation and a Critique

E-text prepared by Kurt A. T. Bodling, formerly Director of Library
Services at Concordia College, Bronxville, New York, USA
An Investigation and a Criticism
TH. GRAEBNER, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo.
Milwaukee, Wis. Northwestern Publishing House, 1921.
Species tot sunt, quot diversas formas ab initio produxit Infinitum Ens. Linne.
To the Memory of my teacher (New Ulm, 1892) John Schaller Educator, Theologian, Student of Science these chapters are dedicated by The Author
I first read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in the library of my sainted uncle, John Schaller, at New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1892. I did not comprehend all of it then, a cause, to me, of considerable chagrin, for which I later found some consolation in the opinion of Dr. Frederick Lynch, who pronounces Darwin's epochal work one of the two most difficult books in the English language. But like many others, I understood enough of Darwin's book to catch glimpses of the grandeur of the conception which underlies its argumentation. It was then that my beloved uncle, out of that wide and accurate reading which so frequently astonished his friends, and with that penetrating dialectic of his, opened my eyes to certain fallacies in Darwin's argument, especially to the fatal weakness of the chapter on Instinct. The reading of St. George Mivart's book The Genesis of Species later convinced me of the accuracy of my uncle's judgment. But the fascination of the subject persisted, and for a time Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy, by the comprehensiveness of its induction and its vast array of data, exercised its thrall. Alfred Russel Wallace's Darwinism, Huxley's Lectures on Evolution, Tyndall's The Beginning of Things, Grant Allen's The Evolutionist at Large, Eimer's Orthogenesis, Clodd's Story of Creation, occupied me in turn, until the apodictic presentation of John Fiske's Essays on Darwinism, no less than the open and haggard opposition to Christianity which prevails in Huxley's Science and Hebrew Tradition and in Spencer's chapters on The Unknowable (so the Synthetic Philosophy denominates God), caused a revulsion of sentiment,—the anti-religious bias of evolution standing forth the clearer to my mind, the longer I occupied myself with the subject.