The living universe / by Sir Francis Younghusband.

  • Francis Younghusband
Date:
[1933]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The living universe / by Sir Francis Younghusband. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Father-Mother acting reciprocally upon one an¬ other, the one completing the other. While that would be the general outline of the picture, can we venture to delineate it in any detail ? Can we be bold enough to picture how, for instance, one very simple thing came about—the form and colour of the flowers? By whom, and how, and wheie, was the pattern of the wild rose designed and coloured? We can only in the very vaguest way speculate on the answer to such questions. But to attempt it is worth while. Some think it is all explained by the theory of evolution. The rose has evolved, like the rest of life, from a simple pri¬ mordial organism. We are asked to suppose the almost impossible supposition that the form and colour not only of the rose but of every other form of life, including men, lay implicit in that original speck of protoplasm. But, even if it were the case that all the forms of life we see here to-day, and all that they will develop into in the thousands of millions of years ahead of us, lay implicit in that original organism, we would still have to know how this tiny system of atoms from the sun could have gathered into itself the germ of such a wonderful development. And we have already noted that it was not of itself alone, but only through the con¬ tinual interaction of the universe as a whole with the primordial germ and its descendants, that the development took place. It was from the universe as a whole that the primordial germ derived its dis¬ position to develop. And it was in response to unceasing stimulation from the universe as a whole
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