Ten years, again, after In Memoriam, came Darwin's Origin
of Species. These dates are worth observing. The theory of
evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as
the theory of creation, and is found among the speculations of the
most backward savages. The Arunta of Central Australia, a race
remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which
postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine
environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of
stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly
differentiated developments. "The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were
in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals
into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of
sight, hearing, or smell." They existed in a kind of lumps, and were
set free from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called
Ungambikula, "a word which means 'out of nothing,' or 'self-
existing.' Men descend from lower animals thus evolved." {7}
This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only
mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind
from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been
the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of
creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern
European belief. But Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others
had submitted hypotheses of evolution.
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