Abstract
“WHENCE sprang this world, and whether framed By hand divine or no—” are questions that have fascinated and perplexed the greatest thinkers of every age, or at least since man reached such a level of intellectual evolution that he could speculate about them. If we may reason from our knowledge of the mentality of the lowest grades of humanity as we know them to-day, it is reasonably certain that man must have existed on the fearth for seons before he attained to a degree of mental development that would enable him to give the slightest Consideration to such matters. Anthropologists tell us that even in this twentieth century there are races of men, situated in remote and widely separated regions? of the world, who have never framed, and, so far as can fee discovered, have never attempted to frame, any con-deption or surmise concerning its origin. And yet hese races are as far removed in development from the prehistoric man as the prehistoric man was from the ape.
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The Genesis of the World. Nature 109, 765–766 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/109765a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/109765a0