THE MISSING LINK.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 26, 27 June 1901, Page 16

THE MISSING LINK.

Hfi missing link ' between the highest form of ape and the lowest form of man' is a long-felt wan i of the Darwinian and neo-Darwiniiln school of biology. The demand has created and uncertain and spasmodic supply — of a kind that, on examination, has thus far invariably turned out to be even less genuine than some of the recently made ' real antiques ' that unwary travellers purchase from street-pedlars in Pompeii and Rome. Every few years — generally in the dull season of the newspapers — word goes round that the real, genuine, and only original missing link has been discovered on some portion of the earth's crust so distant from civilisation or so difficult of access that the couise of inquiry is slow and costly. And thus the legend secures a brief run. But the connecting link invariably coutrives to vanish like a jack-in-the-box or a borrowed florin in the hands of a travelling conjurer. Yet hope springs eternal in the breast of the neo-Barwinian, and his evergreen confidence in the final discovery of the half-ape half-man is touching in the extreme. He reminds one of the story told recently by our valued contemporary, the Boston Pilot, of an enthusiastic amateur fisherman who was looking for tarpon in southern waters. He wrote home to his expectant friends that although he had not seen any thus far, he was quite sure of getting one next day. 'In fact,' said he, ' you may say I have practically caught him.' The missing link has been * practically caught ' once or twice in the islands of the East — last of all in the form of a skeleton in Java. Bnfc it has turned up more frequently in that Land of the Thousand Fictions, the wild heart of Darkest Africa. Stanley's bright and intelligent dwarfs

of the Comro forest were prematurely proclaimed as the longlost ' missing links. 1 And now —according to cable messages appearing in the New Zealand dailies — the lonsr-lost 'ape-like ancestor of the human nice' is once more ' perhaps' discovered in ano^ier tribe of dwarfs whom a French explorer is allege I to have knocked ud against in some unstated region which is described with broad, and perhaps intentional, vagueness as ' CcuUml Africa.'

The story of missing links generally, and of the manape missing link in particular, is not at all calculated to create confidence in this latest tale that has been imported from the wilds of Africa — supposing it to hive really travelled from a place so far afield. The discovery of the missing link — in fact, of two dist'net and separate links — between reptiles and birds was proclaimed in the early sixties with sound of trumpet and beat of drum. < )ne was the fossil of a lizard (named the pterodaetyle) . which could fly ; the other was that of a bird — the archieopteryx of the oolite — which had a somewh.it longer tail than usual and moreover had a set of teeth like a lizard's (or an eel's). Those ardent spirits who w :re in too great haste to await such an unconsidered trifle as a verification of preliminary guess-work, took the sackbut an i the symphony and sang the discovery of a reptile that was half-bird and of a bird that was half-reptile ; and, with the aid of the curious and wonderful logic that serves the camp-followers of science as a substitute for the art of reasoning, they proclaimed that, therefore, the supposedly lizard-like bird wts a lineal descendant of the supposedly bird-like lizard ! Then forth stepped Professor Owen and destroyed the golden legend of the discovered connecting link. He proved that the p^erodactyle had no more wing thin a bat or a flying squirrel has, but merely a membrane ; that it was as true and genuine a reptile aa the alligator or the totara lizard ; that the archseopteryx was shaped like the peregrine falion, or rather, like the grouse, and that it was as re.il and perfect a bird as a grey goose or a crested canary.

Many of our readers can recall the thrill of excitement that went through the nerves of the scien i(io world a few years later — it was in 1868 — when Professor Huxley announced the great discovery of what we raiy term the missing link between inert or lifeless and living matter. The missing link was a sticky ooze or slime brought up from the bottom of the sea. It was — with the usual indiscreet haste — proclaimed to the world as Nature's gran 1 store of protoplasm — the source of all the life that swarms upon the earth. Professor Huxley* described it as * sheet of living matter ' lining the bottom of the sea, and called it by the now rather too famous name of balltybiu*. Kuch a discovery, even if verified, would, of course, leave the proven need of a First Cause and Creator and Author of Life precisely where it was before. Nevertheless, an to triumph? went up from the leaders of materialism. Their exultation was, however, short-lived. Huxley. ILeckel, Strauss, Schmidt, and the rest were in too great has c to wait and 4 check their guess' or 'explode their conjecture.' 'And the consequence was' — says a recent authority upon biology — ' that in a few years the whole scientific world "exploded" with laughter at what Mivaut aptly nicknamed " Huxley's sea-mare's nest." ' The ' grand store of protoplasm' was — as Huxley himself had to admit later on — nothing more than a little inert, harmless, and lifeless sulphate of lime ! ' With the btithybins,' said Viitcnow regretfully, ' disappeared our greatest hope of a demonstration [of the origin of life from mitter] ' And Hj;ckkl had called the vanished and derided iHttlnjbins k the main support of the modern theory of evolution.'

Bat what if that supposed intermediary creature between ape and man should uo length overcome his hitherto invincible bashf illness and really appear in propria prison a upon the world's stage ? What then 'i lie would lea\e the theory of the 'ascent of man ' in practically the same po.sition as. before. (1) Evolution (and especially atheistic evolution) would still remain what it is to-day, a mere theory or hypothesis, which, so far from being proven by scientifically demonstrated facts, has great classes of facts which it ought to, but cannot, explain, or which are set hard against it. Dabivix, with all his prepossessions for his

revived and revised form of an old hypothesis, and his lack of the logical faculty, was a close and keen observer, and was careful to put forth his theory of evolution merely as a theory. But Darwin's later , followers out-Darwined Darwin. Grant Allen, Clodd, and other 'popular' scientists who feed upon the crumbs that fall from the tables of original investigators, elevated what was and is a nu'iv hypothesis into a demonstrated fact, spun glowing romaacos about it, and explained the creation of the universe and the ' i i&e of man ' as minutely as if they were preßent during the whole process and took kinematographic pictures of it — or as their cooks might illustrate the production of an oyster-patty or hu apple-dumpling. They wrap up the thorny points of their subject in masses of sounding and nebulous nonsense ; they at the same time stoutly assert and as stoutly deny an ordered plan of definite progress in the world ; they sail their iridescent theories under Darwinian colors ; but they take especially good care to never hint to their duped readers that the vital principle of Darwin's theory — \atural Selection — has had its day, and that it is now almost as extinct as the dodo or the moa. The late Mr. Mi v art aptly described it as ' the most absurd of all absur J propositions ' ; and it will, in all probability, be soon as little spoken of among trained scientists as the ancient legend that a swarm of bees could be produced by the putrefying carcass of a heifer, or as the exploded theory of spontaneous generation that had so great a vogue a few decades ago.

(2) Aijain : Tn the geological periods, as at the present time, the forms of life persistently group themselves, not in a linear chain, but around certain distinct types or centres — mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, molluscs — with great gaps between. The species found in the earth's strata do not fit into those now existing ; but they fall into the same groups ; and the intersecting gulfs — the missing links — that separate those broad divisions and classifications now, are equally present through the whole geological period. (o) Mr. \\ allace, in his Natural Selection (p. 377), admits that the brain of the lowest savage is far bigger than he needs it to be — bigger, in fact, than his history would account for. its b^ing. And Professor Huxley says of the (probably) oldest known human skull — that of a man contemporary with the mammoth and the cave-bear — that it 'might have belonged to a philosopher.' Man's mental outfit is, then, nut explained by his past, but by his future, history. (I) Moreover, not alone has the theory of evolution of man's body from a lower form of creature tot been proved, to have actually occurred, but no serious attempt has even been made to demonstrate the possibility of such evolution And, as matters stand, the neoDarwinian hypothesis of atheistic evolution creates ten new mysteries for the one it seeks to explain away, and leavesunsolved the greatest riddle of them all — the origin of life.

(.')) Auain : the cycle of life had a beginning. Even the callow • philosophers ' of the Clodd and Grant Allen school are forced (as the Duke of Argyll points out) to admit that there \\a< a time when there was neither seed nor e<rg nor germ to produce a living thing in the ordinary way. But the origin of life is for them — like Prout's Blarneystone politician — 'an out-and-outertobe letalone.' Logically, science leads them back unerringly to the final solution of the puzzles ot matter and life — the Supreme First Cause, God. But rather than find rest in this and in all that it imports, they loave the solution of the riddle a blink impossibility, and take refuge in a cloud of verbal whirligigs and fantastic and unscientific imaginings which — as Professor Tyndall pointed out — leave them ' without an approach to a solution of the mighty question of the origin of life.'

True scientists read aright the signs of things. With all his prepossessions in favor of his pet theory, Darwin himself seemed to realise that the origin of life was something beyond the reach of physical science to explain. Even he could not begin his supposed chain of evolution without assuming the existence of Life and Mind : he needed a live ' mud-fish with some vestiges of mind ' to make a start with. J>r. Wallace, another high-priest of evolution, declares in his Darwinism (1890, p. 476) that the facts of life k point clearly to an unseen universe — a world

of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate.' Sir Joseph Dawson, in his Modern Idms of Evolution, makes it clear that the origin of the universe — of matter and of life — must be ' a First Cause, eternal and self-existent, and this Fiist Cause must necessarily be the living God.' Such, too, is the verdict of such investigators as Sir G. Stokes, Dr. Mivart, Professors Stewart and Tait, and many other noted men of science. ' The study of the phenomena of nature,' says (Sir G\ JStokkn in his Burnett Lrrturr?, 'leads vt<? to the contemplation of a Being from Whom proceeded the orderly arrangement of natural things that we behold.' In his Unseen Universr Professor Stewart says : 'We assume, as absolutely self-evident, the existence of a Deity, WliO is the Creator and Upholder of all things.' And Professor Tait, in one of his articles, has the following caustic criticism on the sciolists of the day : 4 When the purposely vague statements of the materialists and agnostics are stripped of the tinsel of high-flown and unintelligible language, the eyes of the thoughtless, who have accepted them on authority, are at last opened, and they are ready to exclaim with Titania : " Methinks I was enamoured with an ass !" '