Statement by Wilbur A. Nelson

Nelson---[2].

earliest times in which any life existed up to the present. Life forms suitable for one period of the earth’s history, proved unsuitable for another period, and so new forms, therefore, evolved through natural causes.

This is not a new study in Tennessee as geology and its study of buried animal and plant remains has been taught in this state since 1828, at which time Gerard Troost, one of the founders of the Philadelphia Academy of Science, was elected professor of Geology at the University of Nashville, and three years later was elected State Geologist of Tennessee. From that date to the present time, this science, dealing with the age and study of the earth, and its rocks and the buried life which they contain, has been continuously taught in Tennessee.

Such teaching could not have been carried on through 97 years of time, unless the teaching of evolution had been permitted as it was permitted by our religious ancestors who formed this state.

We know that streams and rivers carry sediment; that muddy waters are full of the soil of some field, washed into a nearby stream by a hard rain, and some such soil, when it once gets into a stream, starts on a long journey to the ocean. Most of the streams in this section are muddy for many months in each year, and this mud, which is the soil washed from our gullied hillsides, in this particular case, goes down the Tennessee River, into the Mississippi River and to the Gulf of Mexico.

We know that at the mouth of the Mississippi River the sediments brought down by this river are deposited so rapidly that land is formed which is extending out into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of many feet a year. As a rule, these processes of weather of rocks to produce soil, of [ arosion ] of this