EVOLUTION.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 955, 24 October 1910, Page 5

EVOLUTION.

LECTURE BY ME. V. W. COLLINS. Lecturing on the subject,. , "Man, Whence, How, and Whither"? at His Majesty's Theatre last eveningj. Mr. W. W. Collins thoroughly interested the large audience which' assembled" to hear, him. The lecture .was in the main on elucidation and popular explanation of important facts bearing, on the evolutionary theory. It was prefaced by a brief introduction, in which the lecturer contrasted the belief in a special creation with that heldrby evolutionists, and their respective claims to credence. The former belief, he claimed, must give rise to grave misgivings. If it were true that man was originally created perfect and had fallen from fiat state, there was reason to fear that he might fall further stilL On the other hand, evolution was a hopeful belief. It premised that man was at the present time nearer/ perfection than. he. had ever been,. and who could say to what heights man might yet attain. There was no solitary item of evidence on behalf, of the creation idea. If there'had been it would have been made .use of. ' As a matter of fact, the human; mind 'was incapable of conceiving, a creative act. The creation idea belonged to a pr«-scien±ifio agewhen man knew little of man and still less concerning life itself. On behalf of the theory of evolution a vast array of facts had been. collected, and not a day. passed but science made some further, step and added some convincing proof of. the fact of man's evolution. The theory of evolution belonged to a scientific age—to' an age of highly-developed intelligence. No one to-day could sneer at this theory. The lecture was. illustrated by a fine 6eries of limelight views. The .first was a diagram of the stratified rocks rangdown to those in which fossil remains of . the' lowest known forms of , life have. been discovered. This diagram, Mr. Collins stated, was' a chart illustrating the evolutionary process over a period of a hundred million years. The human mind, he went on, could scarcely conceive even a period of one million years, but if, for purposes of illustration, the hundred million years were taken as equivalent to a single day of twenty-four hours, man's tenure of existence on the earth would, on this basis, be equal to thirty seconds. From this point Mr. Collins, in simple terms and introducing a wealth of illustrations, verbal as well as pictorial, sketched the evolution of life forms from corals, molluscs and orustaceans, through the fishes,. amphibians, reptiles and birds, finally carrying his hearers to the point at which the mammals, including man, appeared,

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