This is plain and emphatic speaking, but it has not been suffered to pass unchallenged.
Dr. Charles Elam, a writer who has already more than once measured swords with the school of naturalists of which Professor Huxley is a foremost champion, has been moved to respond to this latest utterance. He has contributed to the Contemporary Review a paper entitled "The Gospel of Evolution," which, whatever may be its conclusiveness, is one of the sharpest attacks recently sustained by the opposing party. Acknowledging at the start Mr. Darwin's pre-eminence as a naturalist, and Prof. Huxley's equal accomplishments in the department of biology, he yet ventures to continue his doubt regarding the evidence of their peculiar doctrines. He first cites Darwin's admissions that it would be fatal to his theory if any organs existed which could not have been evolved by minute selective modifications, and his further concession that "man, as well as every other animal, presents structures which, as far as we can judge, are not now of any service to him, nor have been so during any former part of his existence. Such structures can not be accounted for by any form of selection or by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts."
Having contrasted Darwinism proper with its exaggerations, in the system of Haeckel, who regards Darwin's admissions of an original creation as contemptible, and recognizes only one force in the universe—the mechanical, Dr. Elam compares Huxley's statement in his American addresses that belief which is not based upon evidence is not only illogical but immoral, with his last assertion that evolution is a fact, doubted only by persons "who have not reached the stage of emergence from ignorance." In 1862 Huxley also said—republishing the statements as late as 1874:
"Obviously, if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are coeval with the commencement of life, and if their contents give us any just conception of the nature and the extent of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in any one group of animals or plants is quite incompatible with the hypothesis that all living forms are the results of a necessary process of a progressive development, entirely comprised within the time represented by the fossiliferous rocks."
Since this confession was uttered, whatever discoveries may have been made, there has not been the faintest indication of the development of any new species by artificial selection, the individuals of which are fertile among themselves and infertile with the parent stock. It may properly be alleged that there has not been time enough for such a slow process, but it yet remains as true as ever that there is no direct evidence in nature of what the Darwinians call favorable variation. It is the unwritten law of nature that one race must die that another may live, this other, in its turn, subserving the same end. Without this law nature would be a chaotic impossibility. If natural selection were a real agency, we ought to meet with frequent, if not constant, evidences of transition, and a slow and gradual, but perceptible improvement in species, especially marked in those whose generations succeed each other rapidly. But we see nothing of the kind. But did selection really exist, it would be incompetent to account for a multitude of structures and functions to which any efficient cause should be applicable, notably to the earliest rudiments of useful organs. Such organs as the eye and the internal ear are quite out of reach of any explanation by natural selection. Since the development of the eyes, due to the simultaneous growth of parts from within and without, the organ itself would be absolutely useless until it had attained such a degree of development as to admit of these separate parts meeting, and so the principle of preserving any useful variety would be quite inapplicable. The same is true of the internal ear.
Dr. Elam next passes in review Haeckel's Geneology of Man from the Lowest Monera to his Present Station as Lord of Creation. What the Germans call invention of species to fill troublesome gaps is illustrated in many ways, but we have room only for a single example:
"The vertebrata must be developed from something, and as yet there has been no smallest indication of anything like a spine or a rudiment of anything that could represent or be converted into one. It costs our author nothing but a stroke of his pen to invent the 'Chordonia,' and whence did they come? They were developed from the worms by the formation of a spinal marrow and a chorda dorsulis. Nothing more—the most trifling modification!—and we are at once provided with the root and stem of the whole vertebrata divisions. It is scarcely any drawback to this stroke of genius to say that there is no evidence whatever that such an order of living beings ever existed; that no one has the least conception of what they were like, or of any of their attributes. Prof. Huxley's responsibility for this imaginative science is evidenced by his declaration that the conception of geological time is the only point upon which he fundamentally and entirely disagrees with Haeckel."
It still remains true that all our positive and direct knowledge as to species contradicts the evolution hypothesis. Its evidence is purely inferential, and, as Dr. Elam quietly says, "As a psychological study it is interesting to observe how many things are deemed impossible to the infinite wisdom and power (which by the terms of the supposition, presided over the arrangements of our world) which are perfectly clear and comprehensible when considered as the result of blind chance and the operation of mechanical causes only." Omitting for lack of space his keen analysis of Huxley's claim of the evidence of evolution from the orchippus to the modern horse, we follow our author from his array of what is not proved to what is actually taught by geology. We quote:
"The succession of forms of life on our globe is demonstrably not such as ought to be the case on the theory of evolution." It was not the small and feeble species or most generalized forms that first appeared, either among mollusks, fish, reptiles or mammalia. We look in vain now for the representatives of the gigantic fishes of the Old Red Sandstone. And where are the mighty reptile tyrants of air, earth and water of the Oolite? * * * These races appeared in the plenitude of their development and power; and, as their dynasty grew old, it was not that the race was improved or preserved in consequence, but they dwindled, and were, so to speak, degraded, as if to make room in the economy of nature for their successors.
Next follows a closely linked argument that will not bear abridgement, showing the physical improbability that man, a walking animal, was descended from a climbing one, and the deplorable consequences which obliterate free will and necessitate the secularization of morals, as elaborated by Prof. Huxley's friend, Mr. Herbert Spencer. This part of the subject has a special interest to Americans, since the work in which Mr. Spencer's views are inculcated has been introduced as a manual in one of our oldest colleges, but its reproduction would widely lengthen our article. It is sufficient to say that Dr. Elam concludes that Mr. Spencer's doctrine, that "actions are completely right only when, besides being conducive to future happiness, they are immediately pleasurable," would justify him in concealing any injury done by him to a friend's scientific apparatus, provided he could attribute it to the weather, or the intrusion of a dog.