Free IGMS Issue 15 by IGMS Page B

creature of which she spoke. We arranged that on the following day, Sunday morning, I would visit her farm and see whatever lay within.
    That evening, I spoke to some of the staff at the House and asked about any local stories of fairies. I learned of a purported sighting at another hydropathic establishment: the White Wells spa, higher on the Moor. In 1820, before the bath houses were roofed over, the attendant (one William Butterfield) arrived early to open up the doors, but the key merely turned round and round in the lock. After forcing the door open, he found to his astonishment a group of fairies frolicking by the water. They were tiny figures, all dressed in green. When he surprised them, they disappeared over the wall and into the heather.
    Natural science deals in specimens rather than anecdotes. I want a creature that you can give to a taxidermist and have stuffed. Yet the girl had promised to show me such a one, and if it did exist, then the earlier stories would imply that fairies had lived on the Moor for some time. Indeed, since such tales stretch as far back as human history -- as far back as revealed Religion -- then the fairy race must have lived for as long as Man.
    But what
kind
of creature is a fairy? That night, after I retired to my room and blew out the candle, I shifted restlessly in my bed, unable to sleep for pondering the question.
    My theory of natural selection requires that life proceeds by common descent. All creatures are related, however distantly. So any particular creature must possess living relatives, of some kind; and ancestral forms should be preserved as fossils. Any beast, however unprecedented to man's eyes, must fit somewhere within the Linnaean taxonomy.
    If fairies exist as material creatures, what genus do they occupy? Where are their fossils? (The fossiliferous strata contain an imperfect sample of past organisms, yet surely we could hope for
one
example to be retained from the entire fairy lineage.) If the traditional description be correct -- like a small man with wings -- it is clear that fairies cannot fit anywhere within the existing genera of Mammalia. We could only accommodate them within Animalia by supposing an entirely separate line of descent, one which has left no close relatives, no intermediate forms, and no fossils. The evidence does not support it.
    It would be simpler, therefore, to suppose that fairies were a separate creation. After all, why should we require all creatures to be related?
    We indeed require it, for if we allow that
any
creature may be a separate creation, then we must allow the possibility to
all
creatures. How could I argue that a wolf must have descended from canid predecessors, if I cannot argue likewise for a fairy? Any opponent could simply say, "The wolf was independently created in its current form, just like a fairy." I would have no refutation for such a critique. Even those who accepted the Wolf might balk at the descent of Man from simpler progenitors, if given the excuse of the Fairy.
    My hypothesis must explain all creatures, or it explains none. Everything, or nothing. The thought burned in my mind:
If this fairy truly exists, it will destroy my whole Theory.
I could sleep only briefly, and kept waking in turmoil. In my dreams, I walked restlessly in a huge library, with a green figure fluttering bat-like above me; and wherever it brushed the shelves, the books crumbled to dust.
    If the creature should prove authentic, I would have to write to Murray and ask him to halt publication of
Origin
. All my work wasted, the labour of twenty years overthrown by a single specimen from a Yorkshire farmyard.
    You may smile at my fears that a fairy could exist. Yet seeing such a specimen might be my punishment for the sin of pride. If I profess to know the Origin of Species, might not God rebuke my presumption by sending a creature that my Theory cannot explain?
    I tried to comfort myself by reflecting that the creature would most probably be