The Evolutionist at Large
Grant Allen
Read by LibriVox Volunteers
These Essays originally appeared in the columns of the 'St. James's Gazette,' and I have to thank the courtesy of the Editor for kind permission to republish them. My object in writing them was to make the general principles and methods of evolutionists a little more familiar to unscientific readers. Biologists usually deal with those underlying points of structure which are most really important, and on which all technical discussion must necessarily be based. But ordinary people care little for such minute anatomical and physiological details. They cannot be expected to interest themselves in the flexor pollicis longus, or the hippocampus major about whose very existence they are ignorant, and whose names suggest to them nothing but unpleasant ideas. What they want to find out is how the outward and visible forms of plants and animals were produced. They would much rather learn why birds have feathers than why they have a keeled sternum; and they think the origin of bright flowers far more attractive than the origin of monocotyledonous seeds or exogenous stems. It is with these surface questions of obvious outward appearance that I have attempted to deal in this little series. My plan is to take a simple and well-known natural object, and give such an explanation as evolutionary principles afford of its most striking external features. A strawberry, a snail-shell, a tadpole, a bird, a wayside flower—these are the sort of things which I have tried to explain. If I have not gone very deep, I hope at least that I have suggested in simple language the right way to go to work. - Summary by Grant Allen (4 hr 11 min)
Chapters
Poem and Preface | 5:42 | Read by ToddHW |
A Ballade of Evolution | 1:42 | Read by ToddHW |
Microscopic Brains | 12:15 | Read by ToddHW |
A Wayside Berry | 9:38 | Read by Keren Smithies |
In Summer Fields | 15:01 | Read by Tom Merritt |
A Sprig of Water Crowfoot | 13:19 | Read by Claudia Caldi |
Slugs and Snails | 12:44 | Read by Lee Vogler |
A Study of Bones | 9:28 | Read by Availle |
Blue Mud | 9:47 | Read by 65tux |
Cuckoo-Pint | 9:19 | Read by 65tux |
Berries and Berries | 8:47 | Read by 65tux |
Distant Relations | 8:31 | Read by Jesse L. |
Among the Heather | 12:58 | Read by Steve C |
Speckled Trout | 11:02 | Read by Doreen Marcotte |
Dodder and Broomrape | 10:04 | Read by Lisa Reichert |
Dog's Mercury and Plantain | 9:09 | Read by Zachery Joseph Holmes |
Butterfly Psychology | 14:06 | Read by Tom Merritt |
Butterfly Æsthetics | 10:41 | Read by Tom Merritt |
The Origin of Walnuts | 16:46 | Read by Steve C |
A Pretty Land-Shell | 9:22 | Read by Keren Smithies |
Dogs and Masters | 9:15 | Read by Tom Merritt |
Blackcock | 9:01 | Read by Lee Vogler |
Bindweed | 12:57 | Read by Steve C |
On Cornish Cliffs | 9:59 | Read by BettyB |