But here is a statement that is spirited and yet tolerably fair:—
“If Natural Selection be true, then what we call a Pig is but a fleeting vision; all the past he has been becoming a Pig, and all the future he will spend evolving out of Pigdom, and Pig is but a moment’s phase in the eternal flux.”
This overlooks the melancholy possibility of an extinction of Pigs, but it may be accepted on the whole as true. And against this Mr. Belloc gives us his word, for that upon examination is what his “Evidence” amounts to—that Types are Fixed. He jerks in capitals here in a rather convincing way. It is restrained of him, considering how great a part typography plays in his rhetoric, that he has not put it up in block capitals or had the paper perforated with the words: Fixed Types.
“We have the evidence of our senses that we are surrounded by fixed types.”
For weeks and months it would seem Mr. Belloc has walked about Sussex accumulating first-hand material for these disputations, and all this time the Pigs have remained Pigs. When he prodded them they squealed. They remained pedestrian in spite of his investigatory pursuit. Not one did he find “scuttling away” with a fore-limb, “half-leg, half-wing.” He has the evidence of his senses also, I may remind him, that the world is flat. And yet when we take a longer view we find the world is round, and Pigs are changing, and Sus Scrofa is not the beast it was two thousand years ago.
Mr. Belloc is conscious of historical training, and I would suggest to him that it might be an improving exercise to study the Pig throughout history and to compare the Pigs of the past with the Pigs of a contemporary agricultural show. He might inform himself upon the bulk, longevity, appetites, kindliness, and general disposition of the Pig to-day. He might realise then that the Pig to-day, viewed not as the conservative occupant of a Sussex sty, but as a species, was something just a little different as a whole, but different, definably different, from the Pig of two thousand or five thousand years ago. He might retort that the Pig has been the victim of selective breeding and is not therefore a good instance of Natural Selection, but it was he who brought Pigs into this discussion. Dogs again have been greatly moulded by man in a relatively short time, and, again, horses. Almost all species of animals and plants that have come into contact with man in the last few thousand years have been greatly modified by his exertions, and we have no records of any detailed observations of structure or habits of creatures outside man’s range of interest before the last three or four centuries. Even man himself, though he changes with relative slowness because of the slowness with which he comes to sexual maturity, has changed very perceptibly in the last five thousand years.
Mr. Belloc a Fixed Type
Mr. Belloc says he has not (“Argument from Evidence”). He says it very emphatically (“Crushing Argument from Evidence”—to adopt the phraseology of his cross-heads). Let me refer him to a recent lecture by Sir Arthur Keith (Royal Society of Medicine, Nov. 16, 1925) for a first gleam of enlightenment. He will realise a certain rashness in his statement. I will not fill these pages with an attempt to cover all the changes in the average man that have gone on in the last two or three thousand years. For example, in the face and skull, types with an edge-to-edge bite of the teeth are giving place to those with an overlapping bite; the palate is undergoing contraction, the physiognomy changes. And so on throughout all man’s structure. No doubt one can find plentiful instances to-day of people almost exactly like the people of five thousand years ago in their general physique. But that is not the point. The proportions and so forth that were exceptional then are becoming prevalent now; the proportions that were prevalent then, now become rare. The average type is changing. Considering that man only gets through about four generations in a century, it is a very impressive endorsement of the theory of Natural Selection that he has undergone these palpable modifications in the course of a brief score of centuries. Mr. Belloc’s delusion that no such modification has occurred may be due to his presumption that any modification would have to show equally in each and every individual. I think it is. He seems quite capable of presuming that.
Triumphant Demand of Mr. Belloc
Mr. Belloc’s next Argument from Evidence is a demand from the geologist for a continuous “series of changing forms passing one into the other.” He does not want merely “intermediate forms,” he says; he wants the whole series—grandfather, father, and son. He does not say whether he insists upon a pedigree with the bones and proper certificates of birth, but I suppose it comes to that. This argument, I am afraid, wins, hands down. Mr. Belloc may score the point. The reprehensible negligence displayed by the lower animals in the burial of their dead, or even the proper dating of their own remains, leaves the apologist for the Theory of Natural Selection helpless before this simple requisition. It is true that we now have, in the case of the camels, the horses, and the elephants, an extraordinary display of fossil types, exhibiting step by step the development and differentiation of species and genera. But this, I take it, rather concerns his Third than his Second Argument from Evidence.