The Green caldron - University Library

10
The Green Caldron
"Jane," I said, "you have smoked L & M, Lucky Strike, Viceroy, Marl-
boro, Winston, Kentucky Brand, Camel, Chesterfield, and homemade ciga-
rettes. You have talked to priests, psychiatrists, businessmen, teachers,
teenagers, Chinese, Czechoslovakians, Japanese, Hawaiians, Germans, Hun-
garians, Swedish, English, and Americans about life, death, philosophy, sex,
politics, morals, religion, and the future of America. You have drunk whiskey,
vodka, rum, gin, vermouth, champagne, and your father's wine in bedrooms,
barrooms, bathrooms, bowling alleys, basements, cocktail lounges, cars and
swimming pools. Have or have not all these things been fun?"
"Yes," I sighed, remembering.
"And have you or have you not enjoyed, along with smoking, jabbering,
and drinking, the pleasures of reading, listening to music, watching plays,
and praying on your knees to a hidden God?"
"I have," I replied, beginning to see the light.
"Then what right have you to laugh at, sneer at, pity, or judge the people
you saw in the places you went to tonight?"
"No right at all," I whispered, scrubbing my ears.
But as I turned on the cold water all my confidence and defiance came
back to me and "There was something sad and wrong in those places!" I
cried to my departing self.
The Process of Natural Selection
THE
Philip G. Plotica
Rhetoric 102, Theme 6
OCCURRENCE OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION IS A FACT
that has been accepted by men of science for hundreds of years. Many
of the famous Greek scientists and philosophers, Empedocles, Thales,
and Aristotle, for example, noticed this phenomenon in the world around
them and studied it. But although the fact of evolution was readily accepted
by most learned men, explanations concerning the method of evolution were
not. Men knew that organic evolution had occurred and was occurring, but
they did not know exactly how. Many theories were offered, some ridiculous
and others not so ridiculous. For a while, the scientific world accepted the
hypothesis of the French zoologist, Jean Baptise de Lamarck, which involved
the inheritance of acquired somatic (body) characteristics. This theory, al-
though totally incorrect, did provide neat explanations of many observable
phenomena and hence was quite popular. In 1859, however, the British
naturalist, Charles Darwin, after several years of intensive study on this
subject, puWished his On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural