Once this is admitted the reversion to the old Christian doctrine of Creation and of con servation in the sense not only of preservation but of the provision of such additions to energy as may be needed for developmental purposes becomes imperative. These are really succes sive creations beyond nature's unaided powers. It is true that many scientists refuse to take the logical step in this direction, but it seems clear also that their determining reason for doing so is that they cannot bring themselves to revert to the conservative position of the older time. Weismann for instance suggested that if there was no such thing as spontaneous generation scientists would have to admit crea tion. He confesses frankly that all the scien tific evidence of the present time is distinctly against the occurrence of spontaneous genera tion, yet he insists that it is the duty of scien tists to accept abiogenesis rather than to con cede the necessity for creation. With creation as the beginning of life and this origin of "the seeds of things" with the absolute necessity for some extraordinary intervention to bring about the differentiation of man the thinker from the animals, the necessity for a creator is affirmed by science; hence the declarations to this effect made by many distinguished scientists of the 20th century. Indeed the greater the scientist the more conservative is his position in this matter as a rule. Evolution so far from con tradicting Christian teaching has simply served make clearer the process by which man's origin was brought about and his relationship to the world around him. Absolute freedom is left for further research in speculation along these lines and Catholic biologists particularly have never felt themselves hampered in the slightest degree by their faith or by the teaching of the Church in the matter.
Many students of science and particularly readers of popular science have become per suaded that the so-called biogenetic law gave absolute assurance not only of man's descent from the animals but of his origin from a sin cell being and his progress through the various forms of life up to his present physical status. The human, like other embryos, is supposed to pass through stages which indicate very clearly that it follows the law recapitulates phyllogeny." As Koken remarked very justly, the so-called biogenetic law originated in a superficial view of facts. The more embryology has been studied the less scientists have been willing to accept it. Oscar Hertwig insists that in any statement of the law we must leave out the words "recapitulation of forms of extinct ancestors" and substitute for them "repetition of forms regularly recur ring in organic development and advancing from the simple to the more Almost needless to say this destroys the original significance of the law. There is scarcely any question now among biologists that the stages noted in the embryonic development of man, or of any other animal, are there not because they serve to record a repetition of ancestral forms, but it is definitely taught that they are there because they are needed for the existence and development of the particular individual at that time. It happens that they resemble similar stages in other and sometimes much simpler creatures, but that does not justify the leap, to the conclusion that there is any such connection as would be indicated by a law of cause and effect between such similar forms. About all,
as pointed out by Weismann, "the resemblances between the human embryo and that of the other vertebrates are so superficial that His, W. von Bischof, Karl Vogt, and many other recent and thorough students of comparative embryology, have protested against Haeckel's views regarding these resemblances as phylo genetically significant identities." He concludes "Nothing but gross want of knowledge can ex cuse a man at the present day in bringing for ward this argumentum ex ignorantia in support of the descent of man from The re capitulation theory has been a favorite source of arguments in education, the social sciences and other scientific modes on which the theory of evolution was thought to throw great light. On it has been made to depend many of the un fortunate applications of the evolutionary theory. Professor Kellogg suggests that "the recapitulation theory of Fritz Muller and Haeckel is chiefly conspicuous now as a skeleton on which to hang innumerable exceptions." Conservative Christian views with regard to the origin of man have been still more strongly confirmed by the recent immense developments of the science of archmology and the increase of our knowledge of the story of man's existence, not from theory, but from actual remains ob tained in the course of excavation. Under the influence of the theory of evolution as a back ground of their knowledge the last generation df the 19th century were persuaded that human beings were in process of making wonderful progress which could be traced almost from generation to generation and surely from cen tury to century. Scientific has made it very clear that man at any time in his history when he was interested an any work was capable of doing wonderful things which stamped him as separated by a very great gap from the animal. Succeeding generations of men have often utterly failed to advance above their forebears as we know them by actual re mains, but on the contrary degeneration has been at least as common a rule in history as progress. The whole question as to whether mankind has ever made any progress has come up and Flinders Petrie, acknowledged as the authority in Egyptology, does not hesitate to say that "what strikes us most is how very little man's nature or abilities have changed in 7,000 years, for what he admired we admire; what were his limits in fine hardiwork are also ours. . . . So far as human nature and taste go man is essentially unchanged in this interval." If man's origin was an act of creation due to the breathing of something Divine that made him like his Creator into his animal body, we might expect to find in him something like this permanency of status. This rather surprising contradiction of the ordinarily accepted idea of facile progress has been strikingly confirmed by the further advance made in in the study of the cave man. The excavations in the Dordogne and in western and southern France and northern Spain have completely contra dicted .the idea that man began low down in the scale of being, scarcely above the beasts, and gradually climbed up. They have shown on the contrary that the very first man of whom we have any definite records many thousands of years ago was the intellectual and the spiritual brother of man as we know him now.