The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JULY 21, 1910. SOME ‘MISSING LINKS’

New Zealand Tablet, 28 July 1910, Page 1183

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JULY 21, 1910. SOME ‘MISSING LINKS’

SHE missing link between ‘the highest form of I ape and the lowest form of man ’ is a longfelt want of the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian •&* school of biology. The demand has created an j uncertain ; and spasmodic supply—of a kind that, on examination, has thus far invariably turned out to be even less genuine than some » 'Sw'' ' of the recently made c real antiques ’ that unIT* wary travellers purchase from street pedlars in Old -World cities. Every few years—rally 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 course of inquiry is slow and costly. And thus the legend secures a brief run. But the connecting link invariably contrives

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-Darwinian, 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 some time ago by our 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. ‘ln 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 Easton the last occasion in the form of a skeleton in Java. But it has turned up more frequently in what the N.Z. Tablet has before described as that Land, of the Thousand Fictions, the wild heart of Darkest Africa. . Stanley’s bright and intelligent dwarfs of the Congo forest were prematurely proclaimed as the long-lost ‘ missing link.’ And —according to cable messages which appeared in the New Zealand dailies —the long-lost ' ape-like ancestor of the human race was once more ' discovered ’ in another tribe of dwarfs whom a French explorer was alleged to have knocked up against in some unstated region, which was described with broad, and perhaps intentional, vagueness as ‘Central Africa.’ Needless to say, that ‘ missing link’ has gone the way of all the rest.

The story of missing links generally, and of the manape missing link in particular, is not at all calculated to create confidence in any new tale that may be imported or in any new ‘ discovery ’ that may be announced. The discovery of _ the missing linkin fact, of two distinct and separate —between birds and reptiles was proclaimed in the early sixties with sound of trumpet and beat of drum. One was the fossil of a lizard (named the pterodactyle) which could fly; the other was that of a bird — archaeopteryx of the —which had a somewhat longer tail than usual, and moreover had a set of teeth like a lizard’s (or an eel’s). Those ardent spirits who were in too great haste to await such an unconsidered ; trifle as a verification of preliminary guess work, took, the sackbut and the symphony and sang the discovery of a reptile that was .halfbird and of a bird that was half-reptile; and, with the aid of the curious and wonderful logic that serves the campfollowers of science as a substitute for the art of reasoning they proclaimed that, therefore, the supposed lizard-like bird was 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 pterodactyle had no more wing than a bat or a flying squirrel has, but merely a membrane; - that it ■was as true and genuine a reptile as .the alligator or the totara lizard; that the archaeopteryx was shaped like the peregrine falcon, or, rather, like the grouse, and that it was as real and perfect a bird as a grey goose or a crested canary. A few years later— was in 1868 a thrill of excitement went through the scientific world when Professor Huxley announced the great discovery of what we may 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 proclaimed to the world as Nature’s grand store of protoplasm the source of all the life that swarms upon .the earth. Professor Huxley, described it as a ‘ sheet of . living matter’ lining the bottom of the sea, and called it by the now rather too famous name, bathybius. Such 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 lo triumphe went up. from the leaders of materialism. Their exultation was, however, short-lived. Huxley, Haeckel, Strauss, Shmidt, and the rest were in too great haste to wait and ‘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 Mivart aptly nicknamed “ Huxley’s sea-mare’s-nest.” ’ The grand store of protaplasm ’ was — Huxley himself had to admit later on —nothing more than a little harmless and lifeless sulphate of lime ‘With the 6 athyhius,’ said Virchow regretfully, disappeared our greatest hope of a demonstration (of the origin of life from matter).’ And Haeckel had called the vanished and derided bathybius ‘ the main support of the modern theory of evolution.’ * But what if that supposed intermediary creature between ape and man should at length overcome his hitherto invincible bashfulness and really appear in propria persona upon the world’s : stage? What then? He would leave the theory of the ‘ ascent of man’. in practically the same position as before. 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. Darwin, 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 4 popular ’ scientists who feed upon the crumbs that fall from the tables of original investigators, elevated what was, and is, a mere hypothesis into a demonstrated fact, spun glowing romances about it, and explained the creation of the universe and the 4 rise of man ’ as minutely as if they were present during the whole process and took kinematographic pictures of it. 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 showy theories under Darwinian colors; but they take especially good care to never hint to their duped readers or hearers that the vital principle of Darwin’s theory— Natural Selectionhas had its day, and that it is now almost as extinct as the dodo or the moa. Moreover, not alone has the theory of evolution of man’s body from a lower form or creature not 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 neo-Darwin hypothesis of atheistic evolution creates ten new mysteries for the one it seeks to explain away, and leaves, still unsolved — spite of Mr. McCabe’s confident assertions and predictions greatest riddle of them all —the origin of life.

* . Again: the cycle of life had a beginning. Even the callow philosophers of the Clodd and Grant Allen school are forced (as the Duke of Argyle points out) to admit that there was a time when there was neither seed nor egg nor germ to produce a living thing in the ordinary way. But the origin of life is for themlike Promt's Blarney-stone politician— ‘ an out-and-outer, to be let alone.’ Logically, science leads them back unerringly to the final solution of the puzzles of matter and —the Supreme First Cause, God. But rather than find rest in this and in all that it imparts, they leave the solution of the riddle a blank impossibility, and take refuge in a cloud of verbal whirligigs and fantastic and unscientific imaginings which—as Professor Tyndall pointed out — 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 mudfish with some vestiges of mind’ to make a start with. Dr. Wallace, another high-priest of evolution, declares in his Darwinism (1890, p. 476) that the facts of life ‘ 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 Ideas of volution, makes it clear that the origin of the universeof matter and of —must be a ‘ First Cause, eternal and self-existent, and this First 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. Stokes in his Burnett Lectures,. ‘ leads us to the contemplation of a Being from Whom proceeded the orderly arrangement of natural things that we behold.’ In his Unseen Universe, Professor Stewart says: ‘We assume as absolutely self-evident the existence of a Deity, Who is the Creator and Upholder of all things.’ And Professor Tait, in one of his articles, has the following caustic criticism on the Grant Allens and McCabes of the day: ‘ 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 enamored with an ass!” ’