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It is the first pulse of organic life. Fatherhood is the fertilizing element. Its development, compared to that of the mother cell, is comparatively new. Likewise, its influence upon the progeny is comparatively small. There are weighty authorities who assert that through the female alone comes those modifications of form, capacity and ability which constitute evolutionary progress.
There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definite and conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom is recognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races of today. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamy obtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might not reinstate polygamy as a legalized custom.
The text-books of psychology now warn every student against the 'intellectualist' fallacy which is illustrated by my quotation from Macaulay. Impulse, it is now agreed, has an evolutionary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which it is often directed and modified.
It has already been pointed out that it derives not from contemporary English Socialism but from the Marxist social democracy of the continent of Europe, and has not even so much of the constructive spirit as has been developed by the English Socialists of the Fabian and Labour Party group or by the newer German evolutionary Socialists.
The increasing influence of national and state bar associations evidences a professional opinion discouraging to the unscrupulous; while a new evolutionary and more humanitarian conception of law is now beginning to be taught, and young men are entering the ranks imbued with this.
Patrick Matthew, again, though writing what is obviously a resume of the evolutionary theories of his time, makes no mention of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, or Buffon. I have not the original edition of the "Vestiges of Creation" before me, but feel sure I am justified in saying that it claimed to be a more or less Minerva-like work, that sprang full armed from the brain of Mr. Chambers himself.
In technical language, this is the problem of use-inheritance, otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characters. It is apt to seem obvious to the plain man that the effects of use and disuse are transmitted to offspring. So, too, thought Lamarck, who half a century before Darwin propounded a theory of the origin of species that was equally evolutionary in its way.
It took a century and a half of evolutionary preachers, from Buffon and Goethe to Butler and Bergson, to convince us that we and our father are one; that as the kingdom of heaven is within us we need not go about looking for it and crying Lo here! and Lo there!; that God is not a picture of a pompous person in white robes in the family Bible, but a spirit; that it is through this spirit that we evolve towards greater abundance of life; that we are the lamps in which the light of the world burns: that, in cohort, we are gods though we die like men.
JUPITER, owing to its prodigious size, being nearly eleven times larger than your Earth, but whose density is proportionately less, might well be styled the Master Planet of our system. Jupiter is well blessed with satellites, having eight, a description of which is not necessary at this time. This planet is in what might be styled its primary evolutionary stage where life has just begun.
Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, viewed in the dry light of modern science? Well, they are simply one of the very oldest mammalian families, and therefore, I need hardly say, in the levelling and topsy-turvy view of evolutionary biology, the least entitled to consideration or respect from rational observers.
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