Page:Creation by Evolution (1928).djvu/390

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CREATION BY EVOLUTION

Bible suggest that sometimes the kidneys were regarded as the organs of mind, or both the kidneys and the heart, as in the New Testament (Revelation, II, 23), where the Son of God says: “I am he that searcheth the reins and the heart.”

Even the Psalmist who wrote the oft-quoted verses (Psalm CXXXIX, 13–16), which have become the special hymn of the anatomist and embryologist, begins with the suggestion that the kidneys are the seat of the will:

Thou hast possessed my reins:
Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise thee: for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works,
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My substance was not hid from thee
When I was made in secret
And curiously wrought in the lowermost parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see my substance yet being imperfect,
And in thy book all my members were written which in continuance were fashioned
When as yet there was none of them.

But of all these works none is so marvellous, so fearfully and wonderfully made as the brain, which confers upon man the supreme distinction of his high powers of intelligence.

The brain affords evidence in corroboration of man’s origin from an ancestor common to man and ape that is too exact and impressive to admit of any doubt as to its significance. By demonstrating that the structures concerned in the highest expressions of human intelligence are already present in the ape’s brain, even if they are very diminutive, the study of the brain adds strength to the conviction that the mind as well as the brain has been evolved. The fact that the Bible in various places assigns the chief seat of understanding sometimes to the heart, at other times to the kidneys, or both heart and kidneys, has not been allowed to

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