through all the improving types. But in the
germinal man, nature does adopt just this method. As the embryo life
develops it passes into and through the likeness of each lower animal,
and ever journeying upward carries with it the special grace and gift
of each creature it has left behind, "sometimes a bone, or a muscle,
or a ganglion," until the excellencies of many lower forms are
compacted in the one higher man. In the human body there are now
seventy vestigial structures, e.g., vermiform appendices, useful in
the lower life but worse than useless in man. When an anatomist
discovered an organ in a certain animal he foretold its rudimentary
existence in the embryonic man, and we are told his prophecy was
fulfilled through the microscope, "just as the planet Neptune was
discovered after its existence had been predicted from the
disturbances produced in the orbit of Uranus." As some noble gallery
owes its supremacy to centuries of toil and represents treasures
brought in from every clime and country, so the human body represents
contributions from land and sea, and members and organs from
innumerable creatures that creep and walk and fly.

Thus man's descent from the animals has been displaced by the ascent
of the human body. This is not degradation, but an unspeakable
exaltation. Man is "fearfully and wonderfully made." God ordained the
long upward march for making his body exquisitely sensitive and fitted
to be the home of a divine mind. How marvelously does this view
enhance the dignity of man, and clothe God with majesty and glory! It
is a great thing for the inventor to construct a watch. But what if
genius were given some jeweler to construct a watch carrying the power
to regulate itself, and when worn out to reproduce itself in another
watch of a new and higher form, endowing it at the same time with
power for handing forward this capacity for self-improvement? Is not
the wisdom and skill required for making a watch that is
self-adjusting, self-improving, and self-succeeding vastly more than
the wisdom required to construct a simple timepiece? Should science
finally establish the new view, already adopted by practically all
biologists, it will but substitute the method of gradualism and an
unfolding progression for a human body created by an instantaneous and
peremptory fiat. But this is a question for specialists and experts.
Those scholars who accept this view, including such thinkers as the
late President McC