So it is and has been from the beginning. We can see the results of changes of one thing into another but never just how the changing is done. While it is no longer believed that species were given a certain form in the beginning and that they have always kept that form, it is still true that each species comes into being from some unseen cause—"all of a sudden," as it were. Because species thus seem to vary of themselves, and not for any reason that we can see these changes are called "spontaneous variations." Always back of the material nature we can see is a nature that is not material; a part of nature that, like the mind of man, we can neither see nor hear nor feel nor know by any of our five senses. Some Unseen Power forms the baby plant out of the seed; some power changes the leaves hidden away in the bud into the petals of the flower. When the leaves gather to form the bud, like little hands playing "button, button, who's got the button," where do you suppose the flower is? It isn't. It has not yet begun to be. But soon, as if some magician had waved his wand and said "Presto! Change!" the pink petals begin to form there in the dark of the cup and, first thing we know, out steps Miss Blossom, all in her pink and gold like a princess dressed for a ball!
But always hidden in a mystery these changes take place. We can peep into the growing bud as often as we like and we will never catch the fairies making the dress, nor the princess putting it on. We always see the thing after it is done!
WONDERFUL ART BUT WHERE IS THE ARTIST?
Another thing: How do the fairies of Roseland remember every spring just how a rose looked, when the roses of last year have been dead and gone so long? You see they work without a model, something great artists seldom do; and in some kinds of work, as busts and portraits and landscapes, never do at all. Even the most powerful microscope doesn't show any pattern in the seed for the seed to go by in growing into the finished plant; or in an egg to tell it what kind of a bird it is expected to be. No, not the trace of a pattern. What then, guides the growth of the seed; of an oak, say, so that it finally and always takes the family form? Some Power, evidently, as intelligent as the power that moves the hand of the human artist when he paints that oak into his landscape. How many of us have stopped to think that not only in the world of mind but in the material world itself, all forms of power are as invisible as the fairies that work unseen in the rosebud and the little birds' egg and the big rock? All power—what we call steam power, wind power, electric power and the rest—are not only unseen but unseeable, unfeelable, untastable. We know steam power only when heat gets into the water and makes steam; electric power only when it gets into a wire or a dynamo; or, passing by unseen ways through the air, moves the wireless telegraph receiver; gravity power only when it moves something as the water of a waterfall; or when it is helping to hold things—the earth and the other worlds—in their appointed paths.
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
You can easily see why evolution is the most talked about of all phases of science—of the study of this wonderful world we live in. One reason is it's such an astonishing thing in itself, this relationship of all forms of life, trees, kittens, birds, and everything; another reason is that in reading the books on evolution you're taken into every field of knowledge and into the most curious and striking aspect of things in those fields. Could anything be stranger, for example, than a little theatre in a chicken's egg, over which pass strange shadowy forms that seem to retell, in a kind of moving picture show, the story of how one form of life developed out of another?
Drummond's "Ascent of Man" tells about that and covers the whole subject of evolution. It is one of the books which no one who has heard of this wonderful story of life should fail to read. Doctor Drummond's way of telling the story is very attractive. Readers from the Eighth Grade up to the Eightieth will delight in it, and they won't stop until they read it from cover to cover. I'll guarantee that!
Then take such a book as "The World of Life," by Wallace. "Alice in Wonderland" is nothing to it. Here are some of the things you will find in it:
How there got to be different kinds of rabbits and what islands have to do with it.
(Islands are almost as prominent in the story of evolution as they are in the story of adventure. There are Robinson Crusoes until you can't rest!)