But as I grew up I found that I had to choose between
Evolution and Genesis. If you believed that dogs and cats and snakes
and birds and beetles and oysters and whales and men and women were all
separately designed and made and named in Eden garden at the beginning
of things, and have since survived simply by reproducing their kind,
then you were not an Evolutionist. If you believed, on the contrary,
that all the different species are modifications, variations, and
elaborations of one primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then
you were an Evolutionist. But you were not necessarily a Darwinian; for
you might have been a modern Evolutionist twenty years before Charles
Darwin was born, and a whole lifetime before he published his Origin of
Species. For that matter, when Aristotle grouped animals with backbones
as blood relations, he began the sort of classification which, when
extended by Darwin to monkeys and men, so shocked my uncle.
Genesis had held the field until the time (1707-1778) of Linnaeus the
famous botanist. In the meantime the microscope had been invented.
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