FOREWORD
I write these words in a room perched high in one of New York's highest towers. Beneath me, in the fading sunlight of late afternoon, there stretches the vast mass of the mighty city's structures. New York it is—but such a New York as never man looked upon before. And it is with its familiar but infinitely strange panorama before my eyes that I start now this record of the great change.
My name is Allan Harker. Dr. Allan Harker, I could say, for it has been seven years since I took the degree and with it a position on the biological staff of Manhattan University. That was a great day for me. Manhattan was one of the most renowned of eastern universities, and its biological department in particular was known to scientists the world over. This was due not only to the department's unrivalled equipment, but also in greater part to two of the scientists who worked in it, Dr. Howard Grant, head of the department, and Dr. Raymond Ferson, his associate. Very proud I was to have won so soon the opportunity of working with those two world-famed biologists. And even prouder I was when, in the next years, my work came gradually to link my name with theirs.
Grant and Ferson and Harker—we were known to scientists across half the world. It was Grant, of course, the eldest of us, who was best known. A tall, saturnine-faced and dark-browed Scotsman, his utter and undivided passion for research was a byword among us. It used to be said, though not in his hearing, that Grant would have vivisected his own grandmother if he thought some new principle might be learned by it. All respected the man, or the man's achievements, but he never had a tithe of the popularity that was Ferson's. Ferson was in fact a complete contrast to his superior, a short-statured man of middle age with unruly hair and beard and warm brown, friendly eyes. As for myself, the third of the trio, I had neither the brilliant scientific mind of Grant nor the keen vision of Ferson, but by dint of ceaseless plodding with monotonous details, I had built for myself a reputation that linked my name with theirs.
Aside from our professorial duties in the university's lecture-rooms, we had each of us our separate work. I was plodding away with my dull experiments on cell-grouping, which I expected would some day yield a theory that would astound all cytologists. Now and then I received help on some difficult point from Ferson, who was himself immersed in an attempt to demolish the Snelsen-Morrs re-vertebration theory by prying into the interior structure of innumerable unheard-of lizards. Grant, however, never received or gave any help, keeping his work entirely to himself. We had gathered, from his rare references to it, that he had been working for months on one of the broader problems of evolutionary science, but that was all we knew, and we were as amazed as any when Grant published the statement that touched off the sensational "evolution controversy."
It is needless for me to give here all the details of the thing. It is sufficient to say that Grant, in his statement, announced that he had solved at last the greatest enigma of biological science—that he had discovered the cause of evolution.
One can understand what an uproar that statement created, and was bound to create. For the cause of evolutionary change has always been the supreme problem of biology. Long ago Darwin and Wallace and Lamarck and their fellows had laid the processes of evolution bare. They had shown to an astonished world that life on earth was not static in forms that had always existed and always would exist, but that it was in constant change and movement up through constantly changing forms. The eohippus had changed, had evolved into the horse, and in future ages would be something different still. The great felines that had roamed earth had evolved into smaller forms and into tame cats. A certain branch of ape-like forms had evolved into great hairy troglodytes and then into modern men. All life on earth was constantly changing, evolving, forced ever upward through the diverging channels of evolution into new and different forms.
But what force was it that pressed earth's life thus upward through the paths of change? What force was it that caused all this vast, slow evolution of earth's creatures into different creatures, that had begun with the first jelly-like life-forms on earth and had forced the tide of life up from them to the forms of today, that still was slowly changing them? That question none could answer. Environment did not explain it, for though environment had certain effects on the life-forms in it, it was not responsible for that deep, vast tide of upward evolution. Mendelism had seemed for a time to suggest an explanation but had failed in the end to do so. Some great force there was, all knew, that pressed life always up the path of evolution, but none had ever guessed what that force might be, and the thing had come to be accepted at last as one of the insoluble problems of science. And now Grant claimed that he had solved it!
"For long," Grant's statement said, "I have held that since evolutionary change is unquestionably caused by some definite and omnipresent force acting upon all life on earth, it should be possible to discover the nature of that force. I will not recount the work of months which I have spent in constant search for this force, but will say that finally I have been successful, have identified the force which my experiments show beyond all doubt to be the single force responsible for the upward course of evolution on earth. That force is a vibratory force, a vibration unknown to earth's physicists prior to my discovery of it, which has as its source the sun!