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The school-texts dismiss it with a few paragraphs; statesmen rarely turn to its valuable lessons of experience; and to the larger number of the American people, the statement that we have lived since our independence under a national frame of government other than the Constitution is a matter of surprise.
The quotation is here adduced to illustrate the vogue which evolution, specifically Darwinism, still maintains in the literature, even in the school-texts of our day. Babes and sucklings are introduced to the theory of evolutionary development, and the theory is presented with an assurance as if it were scientific truth. The words of Agassiz, prince of naturalists, apply to-day.
It was the ugliness of enormous folds of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen with black school-texts.
Speaking in the Darwinian dialect we should say that the authors of these school-texts constitute a case of "arrested development." The preceding chapter concludes our investigation of that stage of evolutionistic thought which owes its origin and name to Charles Darwin. The question suggests itself, do scientists to-day believe as Darwin did? A great many do.
Darwin remains to many scientists what Huxley, I think, called him, the "Abraham of scientific thought." They accept the theory and ask no question. The vogue which Darwinism still enjoys among writers of school-texts has already been noted.
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