Charles Darwin
The Illustrated Story
of Evolution
BY
Marshall J. Gauvin
President of the American Secular Union; Author of
“Is There a Real God?”,
“Is There a Life After Death?” etc.
New York
Peter Eckler Publishing Company
1921
Copyright, 1921,
BY
THE PETER ECKLER PUBLISHING CO.
Printed in the U. S. A.
TO MY WIFE
Whose fine literary taste
applauds the slightest beauty
of a phrase, and whose interest
in this book was helpful in
its preparation.
Introduction
The Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, more than twothousand years ago, entertained the notion that all things have beendeveloped from primitive beginnings. This view was shared in the fourthcentury of the Christian era by St. Augustine, probably the greatestof the church “Fathers.” Then came the Dark Age,—an intellectual nightof a thousand years—an era when reason and science were buried in thegrave of superstition,—and at its close, the Revival of Learning, thedawn of the modern period.
In that golden Renaissance of rational thought and scientificspeculation, philosophical thinkers—Bruno, Campanella andothers—influenced by the theories of the Greeks and by the astronomicaldiscoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo, sought to explain theuniverse as an unfoldment from a simple, early condition of matter.But such speculation was denounced as dangerous, and Bruno died amartyr in the flames. Still the idea that there has been an evolutionin nature persisted and grew, and the writings of Spinoza in Holland,of Locke in England, of Kant in Germany, of Lamarck in France,—tomention but a few philosophers—encouraged men to think that the secretof existence lay in the fact of growth.
Then came the greatest of books on the development of living things.In 1859, Darwin gave the world his “Origin of Species,” a work whichlaid the foundation of the science of evolution. Earlier thinkers hadgroped and guessed with little knowledge of Nature’s laws. But Darwinhad discovered the laws of organic life, and, with an amazing array ofevidential facts patiently observed and gathered in a score of years,he was able to support his view that species have been evolved “bymeans of natural selection” through “the preservation or favored racesin the struggle of life.”
In the interest of the six-days creation legend, a storm oftheological wrath assailed the great man’s head. Knowing that truthwas on his side, the saint of science paid no heed to slander andpatiently worked on. And in twenty-three years he wrought a greater,a more farreaching revolution in the thoughts of intelligent mankindthan was ever accomplished by any other of the sons of men; and whenhe died, England was glad to honor his dust with burial in her sacredWestminster Abbey.
Evolution is as firmly established to-day as the fact ofgravitation. The intellect of the whole world acclaims it as the oneand only principle that explains the phenomena of existence. True itis