The Course Of Biologic Evolution - Annual Address Of The President Of The Biological Society (1890) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JAN 10 1912 THE COURSE OF BIOLOGIC EVOLUTION. Jy- -lkhtkh F. " That organic forms are the product -of evolution is now not only generally accepted by educated people, but is also fairly well understood as a general proposition. But the special nature of the evolutionary process, particularly the modus operand of the laws of development, is only vaguely or crudely comprehended by any but specialists in some branch of biology, and is not clearly understood by all of these. In proof this I recall a lecture by Henry Ward Beecher. delivered in this city within a year of his death, in which he attempted to expound the modern scientific doctrine of evolution, but in which he showed that he had no adequate idea of what is meant by the arborescent, much less by the dichotomous character of the process of organic development, and seemed to suppose that the progress from monad to man had been one continuous ascending series. He mentioned, for example, as among the ancestors of man, a number of animals belonging to the Ungu- lata, Carnivora, etc., which" are known to be entirely off the anthropogenetic line. Such crude exposition of so important a law as that of evolution can only react against the progress of its acceptance as a scientific truth, and there seems to be great need that the ex- "Annual Presidential Address delivered at the Tenth Anniversary Meeting of the Biological Society, January 25. iSgo, in the law lecture- room of the Columbian Vnivcrsitv. act nature of this law be worked out, and that all attempts to popularize it be correct and be accompanied by the necessary qualifications and an explanation of important subordinate laws. Only thus can the coarse and repugnant conceptions which seem to be taking possession of the popular mind be removed, EXTINCTION O...