isposal
may be best utilized by confining attention to a single division of
them--that, namely, which is furnished by the zoological study of
oceanic islands.

In the comparatively limited--but in itself extensive--class of facts
thus presented, we have a particularly fair and cogent test as between
the alternative theories of evolution and creation. For where we meet
with a volcanic island, hundreds of miles from any other land, and
rising abruptly from an ocean of enormous depth, we may be quite sure
that such an island can never have formed part of a now submerged
continent. In other words, we may be quite sure that it always has been
what it now is--an oceanic peak, separated from all other land by
hundreds of miles of sea, and therefore an area supplied by nature for
the purpose, as it were, of testing the rival theories of creation and
evolution. For, let us ask, upon these tiny insular specks of land what
kind of life should we expect to find? To this question the theories of
special creation and of gradual evolution would agree in giving the
same answer up to a certain point. For both theories would agree in
supposing that these islands would, at all events in large part, derive
their inhabitants from accidental or occasional arrivals of wind-blown
or water-floated organisms from other countries--especially, of course,
from the countries least remote. But, after agreeing upon this point,
the two theories must part company in their anticipations. The
special-creation theory can have no reason to suppose that a small
volcanic island in the midst of a great ocean should be chosen as the
theatre of any extraordinary creative activity, or for any particularly
rich manufacture of peculiar species to be found nowhere else in the
world. On the other hand, the evolution theory would expect to find that
such habitats are stocked with more or less peculiar species. For it
would expect that when any organisms chanced to reach a wholly isolated
refuge of this kind, their descendants should forthwith have started
upon an independent course of evolutionary history. Protected from
intercrossing with any members of their parent species elsewhere, and
exposed to considerable changes in their conditions of life, it would
indeed be fatal to the general theory of evolution if these descendants,
during the course of many generations, were not to undergo appreciable
change. It has happened on two or three occasions that European rats