p. 123 | Bryant on Darwin

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 31, 1874

Bryant on Darwin.

IN a speech made by the poet Bryant at a meeting of the alumni of Williams College, he thus treated Darwinism:—

It is a good while since the remark was made by an English wit, that he did not like to look at monkeys, they seemed to him so much like poor relations. What was regarded at that time as a clever jest has since been taken by an eminent naturalist as the basis of an extensive system, which professes to account for the origin of the human species. According to Mr. Darwin, man is an improved monkey. In his system the lowest form of animal life is a minute, animated cell. A number of these cells come casually together and form a dab of jelly fixed on a crag in the ocean.

They somehow become arranged in a sort of symmetry; they gradually acquire organs; they rise to the dignity of oysters and mussels; they multiply; by a principle of selection on the part of the parents they rise higher and higher in the scale of being; they become quadrupeds; they crawl upon the land; they waddle upon the shore in the shape of seals; they build houses as beavers, they climb trees as squirrels; their talons and paws become hands furnished with fingers, and we have the monkeys; the monkey acquires the faculty of speech, and matures into a man. It is the old theory Monboddo propounded a hundred years ago, but spread over a large surface, and set forth with new illustrations.

But allowing all that its author says of consanguinity of man and the inferior animals; admitted that we are of the same flesh and blood as the baboon and the rat, where does he find his proof that we are improving instead of degenerating? He claims that man is an improved monkey; how does he know that the monkey is not a degenerate man, a decayed branch of the human family, fallen away from the high rank he once held, and haunted by a dim sentiment of his old dignity, as we may infer from his melancholy aspect? Improvement, Mr. President and gentlemen, implies effort; it is up-hill work. Degeneracy is easy; it asks only neglect, indolence, inaction. How often do the descendants of illustrious men become the most stupid of the human race?