Evening Post SATURDAY, MAY 23, 1925. BURKING EVOLUTION

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 119, 23 May 1925, Page 6

Evening Post SATURDAY, MAY 23, 1925. BURKING EVOLUTION

The installation by President Coolidge at the White House of an electrical contrivance which gives him all the benefits of horseback exercise without leaving his room is really another proof of his wisdom, for the underwork of their bodies has doubtless as much to do with the breakdown of so many of our statesmen as the overwork of their nerves. But the discovery has, of course, given the wits and that very painful class, "the endeavourers to be witty," a chance of which they have iriade the most. Senators have loaded the pages of the Congressional Eecord with elephantine humour and execrable doggerel as though to show that statesmanship is not the only thing in which they can display a consummate incompetence. But some of the newspaper wit was neat enough.

Perhaps, said the "Brooklyn Eagle," the idea of Mr. Coolidge's mechanical horse was suggested by the stationary donkey so long ridden by Mr. Brvan

It was Mr. W. J. Bryan rather than the President at whom this shaft was directed, but oddly enough it was so timed as to act very much like a boomerang. Ever since his good fight against M'Kinley on a "free silver" platform at the Presidential election of 1896 Mr. Bryan's adventures in politics have been a series of disappointments. But almost on the very same day on which the "Brooklyn Eagle" perpetrated its joke about his "stationary donkey" the "New York "World" came out with the remarkable headline, "Tennessee Goes Bryan." The stationary donkey had won a race at. last, and that of a kind which seems to leave the triumphs of Gladstone and Eoosevelt and all the other thoroughbreds far behind.

We heard so much of the Fundamentalists last year and of the projected heresy hunt which threatened to split some of the principal American Churches from top to bottom that it is surprising that we have not had a cabled word about the startling victory which the cause has won in Tennessee. The article of the Fundamentalist creed of which Mr. Bryan has made himself the special champion is the literal acceptance of the Biblical account of the Creation and the rejection of Darwinism and of the theory of evolution, at any rate in its application to man. Mr. Bryan has long been declaring against the contamination of the minds of children with such abominable heresies. He has done so with the power that always comes from the combination of strong faith and burning eloquence, but with about as much scholarship as that of the''man who said that if plain English was good enough for the Apostles it was good enough for him. The plain, English of the first two chapters of Genesis is good enough for Mr. Bryan in its literal meaning, and the pestilent glosses or contradictions which we owe to the researches and the speculations of the scientists and the philosophers, and especially of Darwin and his disciples, are to be anathematised as the seductions of Satan. "A lie out of hell" is the compendious and elegant description which a colleague of Mr. Bryan's applies to the whole evolutionary philosophy.

It is in this spirit that the campaign for the exclusion of any taint of evolution from the teaching in the public schools has been conducted. In Kentucky a year or two ago it came within a few votes of victory. In one of the articles on "America Revisited" which Mr. Julian Huxley contributed to the "Spectator" in November and December last the statement is made that "there now exist States in which it is a punishable offence to icach Darwinism iv auy Stateaided institution." But ho docs not name the Stales, and the comment excited throughout tho United States last month by a law ■which has just gome into force in .feftMessw iafcajfceji j^ $c, fasti

had not been generally appreciated. For laughter or for lamentation—the approbation has apparently been negligible—the secular Press of America has been discussing as an astonishing innovation the law passed by the Tennessee Legislature and signed by the Governor in the following terms:—

It shall b© unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normal and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part, by the public-school funds of the State to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

In one of the articles to which -we have referred Mr. Julian Huxley says that he went from Oxford to a professorship in Texas before the War, and that he was surprised to find even then "that anti-evolution-ary feeling ran high."

. A conference of ministers of various Protestant denominations had, he writes, recently memorialised the Texas State Legislature with a request that a certain school reader which stated that evolution was probable during geological history might be withdrawn from all State schools. A year later, a biological colleague of mine gave three public Extension Lectures on Evolution—the familiar stuff that was~. exciting England about A.D. 1870. A few weeks later the Southern Baptist Conference was held in the town. One of my students overheard on the street car a local lady Southern Baptist loudly remark to a visiting ditto, "Yes, my dear, I heard Mr. A: lecture—on Evolution, you know. He really seemed to believe it. Such a nice-looking young man, too! ... What a pity to think he's damned."

Possibly a still worse fate might befall the professor who in Tennessee to-day was rash enough to lecture on such a subject, at any rate to his own students; he might even find himself in gaol. It will be interesting to see how the experiment works out. The logic of the measure is, as the "Springfield Republican" says, that there should be a thorough searching of the biological text books used in the public schools and colleges, a thorough examination of the teachers, and "then a turning of the rascals out."

But the Governor's remark that "nobody believes that it is going to be an active statute provides some consolation for the heretics, and the comments of the American Press show that there is little likelihood of the examples being widely followed. The remarks of the "New York World" are typical:—

Man wins in Tennessee. There is no monkey in his making, no upward ascent from humbler stock, no gradual evolution of successive species, and no science The Tennessee Legislature has ruled that Darwin was quite wrong, and that the earth, if not flat, has at least been inhabited from tho start by men like those, who now inhabit Chattanooga. . . . This law, signed by Governor Austin Peay, who seizes the occasion to remark that "all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship as they choose," now takes its place upon the statute books, and there are a dozen universities in Tennessee which will find it dangerous to open books not printed with wood type upon a hand-press. Science outside Tennessee may smile, and, of course, whatever Governor Peay and his colleagues do men s minds will not stop thinking