The great world disaster, ushered in with the dawn of that August morning in 1914, has already brought revolutionary changes in many departments of our thinking. But not the least of the surprises awaiting an amazed world, whenever attention can again be directed to such subjects, will be the realization that we have now definitely outgrown many notions in science and philosophy which in the old order of things were supposed to have been eternally settled. There are but two theories regarding th

I When we were told by a prominent scientist just the other day that "electricity is now known to be molecular in structure," it almost took our breath away. And when we were informed that certain well-known chemical elements had been detected in the very act of being changed over into other well-known elements, with the prospect of such a transformation of the elements being quite the normal thing throughout nature, the very earth seemed to be slipping away from under our feet. Some of the clos

I What has been regarded by many as the greatest scientific triumph of modern times was worked out about the middle of the last century by James Prescott Joule and others, in determining that a certain amount of mechanical energy is exactly equivalent to a definite amount of heat. With this mechanical equivalent of heat all the various other forms of energy have also been correlated; until now we have the general law of the Conservation of Energy, which says that energy can be neither manufactur

"No biological generalization rests on a wider series of observations, or has been subjected to a more critical scrutiny, than that every living organism has come into existence from a living portion or portions of a pre-existing organism." [3] "Was there anything so absurd as to believe that a number of atoms, by falling together of their own accord, could make a sprig of moss, a microbe, a living animal? ... It is utterly absurd.... Here scientific thought is compelled to accept the idea of cr

I With his usual vigor and expressiveness Henry Drummond has given us a picture of the remarkable fact that the cells of all plants and animals are strikingly alike, especially the single cells from which all originate. It is easy for any one to distinguish between an oak, a palm tree, and a lichen, while a botanist will have elaborate scientific distinctions which he can discern between them. "But if the first young germs of these three plants are placed before him," says Drummond, and the bota

I We have seen that there is no way to account for the origin of matter, of energy, or of life, except by postulating a real Creation. We have seen that cells continue to maintain their identity, and reproduce only "after their kind." We must now deal with the higher forms of cell aggregates, which we call plants and animals. It has long been held that these at least are mutable, that one kind of plant or of animal may in the course of ages be transformed into a distinctly different type; and of

"Had Mendel's work come into the hands of Darwin, it is not too much to say that the history of the development of evolutionary philosophy would have been very different from that which we have witnessed." [23] I From the latter part of the eighteenth century, attempts were continually being made to explain the origin of all organic forms by some system of development or evolution. Buffon had dwelt on the modifications directly induced by the environment. Lamarck had made much use of this idea,

I In all the previous chapters I have not been giving any very new facts or any discoveries of my own. True, my conclusions from the facts may seem novel; but in general I have been giving merely facts which are almost universally acknowledged by educated men. The conservation laws of matter and of energy, the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living, the laws governing cell multiplication, are matters of common knowledge and will be found in the appropriate college text-books throu

I We need not here attempt to discuss the existence or even the nature of God. The Infinite One in all His attributes is above and beyond discussion. But there are some things that we can very profitably gather together as the net results of modern scientific investigation regarding the origin of things; and to this task we must now address ourselves in a very brief way. We shall not attempt to deal with the astronomical aspects of the question, or the origin of our world as a planet or the orig

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Fundamentals of Geology Cloth, 270 pages, Illustrated with engravings, charts, and maps $1.25 "I have been intensely interested, ... and I think you prove your points conclusively."--REV. S. BARING-GOULD, Lew Trenchard, England. "It is a very clever book."--DAVID STARR JORDAN, Leland Stanford University. "I have found your book extremely interesting, putting old facts in a new light, and full of acute remarks. Current theories needed criticism."--A.H. SAYCE, Oxford U