The Meaning of Evolution

by Samuel Christian Schmucker

While there is no land mammal to-day as big as the heaviest of the reptiles in the Mesozoic, the whale, which is one of the mammals that has again taken to the ocean, surpasses in size even those gigantic creatures. There never lived in the world before a creature quite so big as the biggest of our whales. Size, however, is not the most important point in any animal. Speed, sagacity, variability, and power of adaptation, these are the qualities which the world prizes, and these the new mammals possessed.

The next geological era is the Cenozoic, or period of modern life. This is divided into two quite distinct sections, the Tertiary and the Quaternary. This era began about five million years ago, roughly speaking, and is still going on. The greater half of it is known as the Tertiary. It was during this time that the mammals came to their own. At first these creatures belonged to what the scientist knows as generalized types. They are jacks-of-all-trades. The student of early animal life finds in the little Phenacodus, which was scarcely bigger than a good-sized setter dog, the beginnings from which many forms have subsequently developed. This creature showed points of structure which to-day may be seen in such diversified animals as the dog, the horse, the rabbit, and the monkey. It is not, of course, suggested that Phenacodus was the immediate ancestor of any of these. But there were no animals in those times more like these I have mentioned than was Phenacodus, and from forms like it in main features all of these other animals have since been derived, each species of animal having become adapted to one particular kind of life. The development of diversified situations on the earth, the varieties of climate, the variation between marsh and upland, between valley and plateau, furnish a complexity of environment into each niche of which a new form of animal fitted itself.

With the increased complexity of mammals comes the submergence of the reptiles and amphibians to-day. In all sorts of situations we find mammals. The old-fashioned continent of Australia is separated from everything about it by deep water, impassable to any animal which lives upon it. In this secluded country evolution is very slow and animals are very antiquated. We still find there mammals with the ancient habit of laying eggs in a hollow in the ground, though after these eggs are hatched the young are nursed on the milk of the mother. But on the great continental stretches, where competition is keen, where the animal must battle for his life against a wide field of other animals, where migration into new situations is possible, the rapidity of the development has been very much greater.

It is in such a situation that man has arisen. In the extreme southeastern portion of Asia, and on the islands lying close to the coast, his highest non-human relatives, members of the ape family, have reached their best development. These, of course, are not man's ancestors. They are the less progressive members who are left behind entirely in the race. Whether we have to-day any traces of the steps by which man arose from the animal beneath him is vigorously disputed. Eminent scientists will be found on both sides of this question.

Many scientific writers to-day take it for granted that one form, discovered in Java, while it may not be in the absolutely direct line, must be very close indeed to the line of ascent toward man out of the apelike forms. A scientist by the name of DuBois, working in the banks of a stream in south-central Java, found a thigh bone which seemed to him exceedingly human in its general character and yet not absolutely like the human thigh bone. The oncoming of the rainy season raised the water in the river so that DuBois could not continue his search. Returning a year later, and digging back deeper into this bank, he found a skull cap and two molar teeth which seemed to him to belong to the thigh bone, although they lay several yards farther back, but at the same level in the bank.

When these bones were subsequently presented to a meeting of European scientists by DuBois, he claimed to have found the "missing link" for which there was so eager a demand. Some of the best anatomists of the meeting, notably Virchow, laughed at his claim and said that the skull cap was simply that of a human idiot, and could be duplicated in any large asylum. A committee of twelve naturalists was appointed to report upon DuBois' find. Of this committee three asserted the bones to be those of a low-grade man, three insisted that they belonged to a high ape, of a type somewhat higher than any we know to-day, but still distinctly an ape. Six members of the committee of twelve agreed that the remains were those of a creature higher than an ape and lower than any normal man, and represented, in their opinion, a stage distinctly along the line of development out of the apes and into man.

This so-called "Java find" is known in science by the name of Pithecanthropus, which means the ape-man. Whether we look upon this fossil as a serious find or not, it is very certain that in the caves of Europe belonging to the Quaternary period we find abundant evidences of primitive man. The older these evidences are, the more likely they are to be distinctly below the grade of man of to-day, in the size and shape of the brain case and in the length and massiveness of the jaw.

There are probably more races than one represented among these skulls. Some of them are surely well-deserving of the title of low brow. Their heavy ridges over the eyes, their small foreheads, their massive, heavy-set jaws show a race of men far less endowed mentally and much better endowed in the matter of brute force than the men of to-day. These skeletons, or parts of skeletons, are turning up every year, and we are just beginning to know much about them. Capable men are studying them with much care. The next fifty years may not improbably make the history of the ascent of man as clear as is now that of the horse, to which we shall refer later.

The whole question of the descent of man from the lower animals, or his ascent from them, as Drummond aptly termed it, is to most people so entirely repugnant as to set them at once, and finally, against all willingness to consider the question of Evolution. This, however, does not solve the problem. Even though truth be horribly unpalatable, it is still to be believed if it is only the truth. There is practically no doubt left among scientific men of the origin of man in lower forms. The evidences grow more and more complete year by year, and from every line of investigation. Whether we study his anatomy, his embryology, his history, his language, or his civilization, all indications point in the same direction. Constant discoveries indicate the fact of an enormously long development from a very humble form. If this proves to be true and remains unpalatable, the fault lies in the palate and not in the truth. Gradually we are coming to understand that there is no reason why this truth should be unpalatable. We consider a rise from humble conditions to be the glory of our heroes; we esteem it an added charm in their strength that they should have developed from untoward surroundings. It is not a disgrace to man to have descended from the apes. It is to the glory of man that he should have ascended from forms not much more promising-looking than the apes of to-day. We must repeat, however, that the apes were the unprogressive members, and hence we must not judge man's ancestors too harshly. It must have been in them to rise. But the great glory in the thought of the humble ancestry lies in the possibilities of his future. If out of a creature not materially unlike the gibbering ape of to-day there should have come, under the guiding hand of an Almighty God, creatures with the endowments and capabilities of man of to-day, then this is only an earnest and foretaste of that which may be expected in the future. A time will come when man shall have risen to heights as far above anything he now is as to-day he stands above the ape. Even then there seems no end. With Infinite Power as the agent, and limitless time in which to work, man would be limiting God to an extent unwarranted by the history of the past to imagine that His process had stopped to-day, and that man, with his many imperfections of body, of mind, and of morals, should be the best that is yet to come. There cling to him still the limitations and dregs of his brute life. Often the brute in him comes to the surface. Little by little he is coming to be dominated by the qualities God has last given him. Slowly the brute shall sink away, slowly the divine in him shall advance, until such heights are attained as we to-day can scarcely imagine. As we can scarcely conceive the beginnings of this process, so we can with difficulty imagine its end. This only can be seen by the Eternal through whom it shall all come to pass, and by whom all will in time be accomplished.