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Last time, we saw the schoolteacher John Scopes deliberately incriminate himself for teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act, as part of a scheme to test the constitutionality of the Butler Act and also to attract publicity to the town of Dayton, Tennessee.

And now it's time for the actual trial.

On Friday morning, the participants arrived at the court. The judge had relaxed the normal dress code requirements on account of the heat, and the lawyers were mostly dressed in shirts and suspenders, top buttons undone, sleeves rolled up - the notable exception was Dudley Field Malone, on the defence side, who kept his double-breasted jacket buttoned up and wiped the sweat off his face with a handkerchief. William Jennings Bryan, the star of the prosecution, was vigorously fanning himself.

With the courtroom's numerous fans struggling against the Tennessee summer, and the crowd of journalists and spectators spilling out into the yard, the judge finally ordered the courtroom's door closed.

The trial opened with a prayer from a local minister, that takes up almost an entire page of the trial transcript. Needless to say, Darrow found this objectionable, and writes in his autobiography

"This was new to me. I had practiced law for more than forty years, and had never before heard God called in to referee a court trial. I had likewise been to prize fights and horse races, and these were not opened with prayer. After adjournment we went to the judge and told him that in a case of this nature, especially, we did not consider it fair or suitable to play up their side by opening court proceedings with prayer; it was not a form of church service; it was a trial in a court; and at best it was an unfair weapon to introduce, particularly as the case had a religious aspect."

And then, on Friday, July 10, 1925, at 9:22 AM, Judge Raulston called the case. To make it clear what the Butler Act actually banned, he read out the act and also the first chapter of Genesis.

The first task was to select a jury.

It was clear from the outset that finding 12 qualified locals who weren't strongly anti-evolution was unrealistic.

Clarence Darrow writes:

"Tennessee seemed to understand the significance of the battle. Especially did Dayton. Fences, bridges, buildings, streets were placarded with giant signs, and mammoth banners swung from tree to tree in the courtyard that could be easily read a block away summoning the community to "Come to Jesus," "Prepare to meet thy Maker" - and the slogan of all the section, greeting one at every turn, was: "Read your Bible daily.""

And the notorious HL Mencken comes out with this about the town:

"Its people are simply unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible. The most they can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who is in error about the meaning of this or that text. Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of boiling his grandmother to make soap in Maryland."

Clarence Darrow questioned a Minister on whether he preached about evolution. He said he had, and was rejected. Several people present applauded when he stated his opposition to Evolution, and were firmly told off by the judge. This kind of thing went on for a while, But eventually they got a jury together - virtually all churchgoers, and mostly seemingly moderate anti-evolutionists (and bear in mind they wanted to downplay the strength of their opinions to get on the jury). And that was day one.

Overall, the opening of the trial of the century had been a bit of an anti-climax. All that had happened was jury selection, and that had been smoother than expected, with the defence having already resigned themselves to a largely anti-evolution jury. There'd been a bit of a discussion of the defence's expert witnesses - the prosecution wanted them excluded (after all, Scopes had already admitted to teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law, and whether experts believed in Evolution was irrelevant), and Darrow didn't want the expert witnesses travelling all the way to Dayton only to find out they wouldn't be allowed to testify anyway. The judge refused to rule on it until they actually got to that bit of the trial.

The star attraction, the Great Commoner William Jennings Bryan, hadn't spoken a single word, just sitting there, sweating, with his palm-leaf fan.

And this was a Friday, too, so the rest of the business would have to wait over the weekend.

With no monkey trial action, there actually wasn't much else to do in Dayton itself - and as Mencken was keen to point out, the Methodist-dominated town was a rare example of somewhere in the prohibition-era US where it actually was difficult to obtain alcohol - so most of the people who'd come from out of state went elsewhere for the weekend, often the Great Smoky Mountains.

Obviously there were still attention-seekers around, and one Anti-Christian speaker ended up being arrested for disturbing the peace.

On Saturday night, John Scopes, as he often did, went to the weekly dance at a resort a few miles out of town. After the dance, a girl he knew, who apparently he'd once dated, apparently innocently asked him to walk her across the unlit area between the dance pavilion and the hotel. He obliged, thinking nothing of it. He writes

"As we were walking in darkness, she suddenly wrapped her arms around my neck and started kissing me. She caught me totally by surprise and as I stood there, momentarily paralyzed, floodlights flashed on.

Was it coincidence that a photographer happened to be handy, and that as the lights went on, he took a picture of us?"

Anyway, when that picture ended up plastered over the papers, Scopes learned he was going to have to be more careful about this sort of thing now that he was a celebrity.

Bryan, though, had better things to do. He spent his Saturday writing a statement on the case. He claimed that the law was perfectly clear on precisely what it banned teachers from teaching, so there was no need for so-called experts from Northern cities to explain to the Tennessee jury exactly what it meant.

"If the people of Tennessee have a right to pass laws for the protection of the religion of their children, then they have a right to determine for themselves what they consider injurious and dangerous to their children. No specialists from the outside are required to inform the parents of Tennessee as to what is harmful. The testimony of such experts, therefore, is not only incompetent, but would be offensive."

Then Darrow had to reply

"Men have debated a long time as to the meaning of much in the Bible, and especially of the account of creation, and yet a Tennessee jury that has given no attention to evolution is supposed to know, first, what evolution is; secondly, what the Bible teaches in reference to the creation of man, and, third, whether these theories and the account in the Bible are in-conflict. And Mr. Bryan says they should decide all this without evidence. It is obvious that no jury can accomplish any such thing."

And later in his statement

"The effort to keep the defense from offering evidence in this case is a plain effort to run away from the facts, and is doubtless on account of their inability to get any scientific man in the world to deny the facts that prove the correctness of evolution."

And

"Mr. Bryan's statement about the rights of Tennessee to protect its religion is ambiguous, if he means that any State has the right to pass a law which prohibits the teaching of a theory that is contrary to any religion, and in doing so he is flying in the face of every State Constitution."

On Sunday, Bryan delivered the sermon at a local Methodist church, with the judge in the congregation, reasserting his opposition to the defense's plan to introduce expert witnesses. And then in the afternoon he spoke outside for the crowds who there wasn't space for in the Church. Charles Francis Potter, a Unitarian minister and a well-known Modernist personality, spoke that evening in the same spot, giving his talk on the value of religious tolerance to a much sparser audience than Bryan's vast throng.

Going into day 2, we get into the actual business. The day opened with another prayer by another minister, this time only half a page of the transcript.

The defense began with Neal arguing, in a rambling way, that the Butler Act was unconstitutional on several counts (not in terms of the US Constitution, but in terms of the Constitution of the State of Tennessee). There are a few procedural issues, but more interestingly, Neal brought up things like the constitution's guarantee of the State government's neutrality on matters of religion, its guarantee of freedom of speech and a free press, and its claim that

"It shall be the duty of the general assembly in all future periods of the government to cherish literature and science."

He also brought up the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Basically, the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, passed just after the Civil War, says that State legislatures can't deprive people of "life, liberty or property without due process of law". The guarantee of due process was understood to protect people from unreasonable laws made by state legislatures.

Hays, somewhat more succinctly, took over from Neal, and ran with the unreasonableness argument. He drew a comparison between the Butler Act and a hypothetical law requiring the death penalty for public school teachers who teach that Earth orbits the Sun.

"Now, my contention is that an act of that sort is clearly unconstitutional in that it is a restriction upon the liberties of the individual, and the only reason Your Honor would draw a distinction between the proposed act and the one before us is that it is so well fixed scientifically that the earth and planets move around the sun. The Copernican theory is so well established that it is a matter of common knowledge"

This argument has the additional advantage that it makes the question of whether the theory of evolution is true much more relevant to the case, which I guess meant the expert witnesses that the defence had lined up, testifying to the overwhelming scientific evidence in favour of evolution, were more likely to be admissible.

The next approach from the defence was on the Butler Act's religious content. At the time, using the US constitution to make this argument was unlikely to work, because the first amendment was taken as binding on the US government but not the government of Tennessee. But fortunately for the defence, the Constitution of the State of Tennessee actually says something very similar about the relationship between the government and religion.

"no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship."

A law that explicitly bans teachers from contradicting the Bible specifically seems to me like a fairly obvious violation of this, and the defence thought similarly. Neal, Malone and Darrow attempted this argument only to be met with nonsequiturs from prosecuting attorney Thomas Stewart as inane as any you might see on Twitter.

"Does not it prefer the Bible to the Koran?"
"It does not mention the Koran."
"Does not it prefer the Bible to the Koran?"
"We are not living in a heathen country."
"Will you answer my question? Does not it prefer the Bible to the Koran?"
"We are not living in a heathen country, so how could it prefer the Bible to the Koran?"

Putting the religion issue aside (where I honestly don't think they had a leg to stand on), the prosecution came back to the free speech issue, making a far more coherent argument that public school curricula were something that the state had a right to legislate on:

"Mr Scopes might have taken his stance on the street corner, and expounded until he became hoarse, as a result of his effort and we could not interfere with him; but he cannot go into the public schools, or a school house, which is controlled by the legislature and supported by the public funds of the state and teach this theory."

Clarence Darrow rounded off the day with a long speech. The defence were fully expecting Bryan to absolutely go to town on his closing statement, to take the opportunity to deliver one of his trademark tirades about the evils of teaching evolution in schools, which the obviously sympathetic jury would be very receptive to - and obviously that would end up dominating the papers, and becoming the highlight of the whole affair, whether or not Scopes was found guilty. So the defence's plan was simply not to make a closing statement of their own, thus depriving Bryan of the opportunity. With no closing statement, this had to be good.

And it was. Mencken wrote

"The clangorousness of it was as important as the logic. It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles".

In a speech that takes up 13 pages of the trial transcript, Darrow focussed on the religious aspect of the case, easily the strongest of the constitutional arguments, saying of the act that

"It makes the Bible the yardstick to measure every man's intellect, to measure every man's intelligence, and to measure every man's learning."

And that

"The state of Tennessee under an honest and fair interpretation of the Constitution has no more right to teach the Bible as the divine book than that the Koran is one, or the Book of Mormon, or the book of Confucius, or the Essays of Emerson."

And that the Butler Act

"Is full of weird, strange, impossible and imaginary provisions. Driven by bigotry and narrowness they come together to make this statute and bring this litigation."

He appealed to the ideals of intellectual freedom espoused by the founders of the United States, claiming the Butler Act was a betrayal of those values.

"Can a legislative body say, "You cannot read a book or take a lesson, or make a talk on science until you first find out whether you are saying against Genesis"? It can unless that constitutional provision protects me. It can. Can it say to the astronomer, "You cannot turn your telescope upon the infinite planets and suns and stars that fill space, lest you find that the earth is not the center of the universe and there is not any firmament between us and the heaven"? Can it? It could - except for the work of Thomas Jefferson, which has been woven into every state constitution of the Union, and has stayed there like the flaming sword to protect the rights of man against ignorance and bigotry, and when it is permitted to overwhelm them, then we are taken in a sea of blood and ruin that all the miseries and tortures and carrion of the Middle Ages would be as nothing."

And his conclusion:

"We are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century when bigots lighted faggots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind."

And that evening, heavy clouds crowded into the muggy Tennessee Valley, a great wind blew and thunder echoed from the escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau.

The judge asked a third minister to open Day 3 with another prayer, and this time Darrow was able to get in with an objection before it even started. An argument followed, with Malone saying that the prayers the judge was in the habit of starting every day with "help to increase the atmosphere of hostility to our point of view, which already exists in this community by widespread propaganda."

Stewart, from the prosecution, responded with

"So far as creating an atmosphere of hostility is concerned, I would advise Mr. Malone that this is a God fearing country."

In the end, the judge was having none of it, and invited Reverend Stribling to go ahead with his prayer. And, to be fair, it was the shortest one yet, at about a third of a page of the transcript.

This debate took up most of the morning. The judge had planned to give his opinion on the motion to quash the indictment, but the storm had taken out the town's electricity, so he hadn't been able to finish it. There wasn't much else to do today, so the morning session ended early.

There wasn't much going on in court, but outside over the lunch break there was plenty to see. The jury (who, no doubt to their great disappointment, had actually not been allowed to watch any of the trial so far), and William Jennings Bryan went out to admire an exhibit consisting of two chimpanzees and 51-year-old Jo Viens of Burlington, Vermont, a man with dwarfism who was alleged by the proprietors to resemble a 'missing link' between humans and chimpanzees - and this is barely even a century ago. There are people alive now who were also alive then.

The proprietors of this bizarre exhibit insisted, though, that it actually proved Darwin was wrong, and humans do not descend from apes - in fact the very opposite is true, apes descend from humans, by a process that they called 'devolution'.

Going into the afternoon, we had the same argument about prayer that we had in the morning. Hays read out a petition signed by two Unitarian ministers (including Charles Francis Potter), a Congregationalist minister and a Rabbi, concurring with the defence's objections to Raulston's habit of starting each day of the trial with a prayer from a fundamentalist minister.

"We beg you to consider the fact that among the persons intimately connected with, and actively participating in this trial of Mr. John T. Scopes there are many to whom the prayers of the fundamentalists are not spiritually uplifting and are occasionally offensive."

Hayes suggested that if they were going to start every day with a prayer, they could have some from who he called

"men who think that God has shown His divinity in the wonders of the world, in the book of nature, quite as much as in the book of the revealed word."

The judge decided on a compromise. Instead of choosing the pastors to deliver the daily prayers himself, he'd have them chosen by the local Pastors' association. The fact that this was an organisation dominated by fundamentalists was noted by Neal, but there wasn't much the defence could do about it.

Then it turned out someone had leaked the judge's opinion to the press before he'd actually read it, and he appointed a committee to investigate who it was, and that was that for a short third day in which virtually no actual business took place.

Day 4 opened with the shortest prayer yet, at just one paragraph, and it was actually given by the Unitarian Modernist Charles Francis Potter. Nevertheless, as had become something of a ritual by this point, Neal objected. The resulting argument didn't go anywhere.

And on the topic of the judge's opinion being leaked, that was sorted. It turned out what had happened was that the judge had told a reporter that the trial would continue on Wednesday - the reporter had correctly inferred from this that there would be a trial, and the judge wouldn't quash the indictment. The journalist got a severe bollocking.

It was time for the judge to read his opinion on the defence motion to quash the indictment.

Nobody was particularly surprised when he overruled it (not only because it had already been leaked). The trial would continue. Raulston expounded on his reasoning for the whole of the morning session.

The afternoon session began with a heading in the transcript "Court thanks little girl for flowers". And then with the motion to quash the indictment out of the way, the defence entered a plea of Not Guilty. There was indeed going to be a trial.

Malone was known for being a talented public speaker. In the words of Scopes,

"As an orator, Malone was in a class with Bryan; he was a Bryan with more substance to his words."

So naturally it fell to him to set out the Defence's theories. Essentially, they would argue that the Butler Act required the prosecution to prove not only that Scopes had taught evolution, but that what Scopes had taught was contrary to the Bible. Malone explained that while the opinion of the defence was that Evolution was in conflict with the account of creation given in Genesis, there were plenty of people who believed it wasn't, and furthermore, being a Christian didn't automatically necessitate a belief that the story of Creation in Genesis was literal scientific fact.

"While the defense thinks there is a conflict between evolution and the Old Testament, we believe there is no conflict between evolution and Christianity. There may be a conflict between Evolution and the peculiar ideas of Christianity, which are held by Mr. Bryan as the Evangelical Leader of the Prosecution, but we deny that the Evangelical Leader of the Prosecution is an authorized spokesman for the Christians of the United States. The defense maintains that there is a clear distinction between God, the Church, the Bible, Christianity and Mr. Bryan."

It follows, then, that whether or not teaching evolution automatically contradicts the Bible (as would be necessary for it to violate the Butler Act), is a matter of personal religious opinion, and not something the prosecution can prove beyond reasonable doubt in court, or something that could be legislated at all. He gave a lengthy quote from William Jennings Bryan himself, from his introduction to Thomas Jefferson's Statute of Religious Freedom.

"Jefferson put first that which I want to speak of last: It was that the regulation of the opinions of men on religious questions by law is contrary to the laws of God and to the plans of God."

Then Malone argued that it was actually virtually impossible to teach science without teaching evolution. He cited the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution, giving the example of how human embryos start out very similar to the embryos of other vertebrates, with things like a tail and gills, and then the development of the embryos diverges. He also described how important the theory of evolution was to human society, especially agriculture, and even found time to correct the antievolutionist claim that the theory of evolution claims humans descended from monkeys, pointing out that what it actually says is that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor (I'm not sure how this was particularly relevant to the case, but it's an important correction of a common misconception nonetheless).

Malone concluded his speech like this:

"The purpose of the defense will be to set before you all available facts and information from every branch of science to aid you informing an opinion of what evolution is, and of what value to progress and comfort is the theory of evolution, for you are the judged of the law and the facts, and the defense wishes to aid you in every way to intelligent opinion.

The defense denies that it is part of any movement or conspiracy on the part of scientists to destroy the authority of Christianity or the Bible. The defense denies that any such conspiracy exists except in the mind and purpose of the evangelical leader of the prosecution. The defense maintains that the book of Genesis is in part a hymn, in part an allegory and work of religious interpretations written by men who believe that the earth was flat and whose authority cannot be accepted to control the teachings of science in our schools.

The narrow purpose of the defense is to establish the innocence of the defendant Scopes. The broad purpose of the defense will be to prove that the Bible is a work of religious aspiration and rules of conduct which must be kept in the field of theology.

The defense maintains that there is no more justification for imposing the conflicting views of the Bible on courses of biology than there would be for imposing the views of biologists on courses of comparative religion. We maintain that science and religion embrace two separate and distinct fields of thought and learning.

We remember that Jesus said: 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.'"

And then, finally, the moment everyone had been waiting for since Friday morning: William Jennings Bryan spoke. In response to the judge telling off Malone for quoting the Great Commoner in his speech, he said

"The court can do as it pleases in carrying out its rules; but I ask no protection from the court, and when the proper time comes I shall be able to show the gentlemen that I stand today just where I did, but that this has nothing to do with the case at bar."

He was met with applause, for which the judge threatened to throw out the applauders, and then he was silent for the rest of the day.

Then we finally get to the witnesses.

First up, the prosecution.

The first prosecution witness was the school superintendent Walter White. He was one of the people who'd worked with the industrialist George Rappleyea to set this whole thing up and bring media attention to their struggling town. But unlike Rappleyea, who was very firmly an evolutionist, Walter White opposed the theory of evolution, so he was perfectly placed to testify for the prosecution.

He testified that Scopes had vaguely mentioned to him that he'd used Hunter's Civic Biology as a teaching material when he was filling in for the biology teacher. What's interesting about this, as I mentioned in the last episode, is that not only was Hunter's Civic Biology endorsed by the State of Tennessee as a Biology textbook, but it also discussed the evolution of humans in a way that the prosecution at least would consider to be a flagrant violation of the Butler Act. On the question of whether Scopes had actually taught the bit about evolution, White's testimony was quite vague.

"Did he say to you in reference to this book that he had taught that part that pertained to evolution?"
"Yes, sir."
"What did he say?"
"He admitted that he had taught that. He said that he couldn't teach the book without teaching that and he could not teach that without violating the statute."

White was, after all, under oath, and if you remember the last episode, Scopes himself actually wasn't at all clear on whether he'd taught evolution or not. This was probably the closest White could come to actually incriminating him.

Thomas Stewart, the prosecuting attorney, wanted to enter the King James Bible as evidence of what the Butler Act meant when it said "the Bible". Hays objected, saying that there are all sorts of different translations, and the act never actually says which one, so the prosecution would actually have to prove that it was the King James Bible that the act meant. After all, part of the defence's reasoning was that the existence of multiple Bible translations that contradict each other in places meant that you couldn't objectively say whether or not someone was contradicting “The Bible” by teaching evolution. The judge overruled the objection and the King James Bible was entered as evidence.

The Prosecution's next witnesses were two students taught by Scopes - 14-year-old Howard Morgan and 17-year-old Harry Shelton. Morgan quite definitively incriminated his teacher.

"He said that the earth was once a hot molten mass, too hot for plant or animal life to exist upon it; in the sea the earth cooled off; there was a little germ of one cell organism formed, and this organism kept evolving until it got to be a pretty good-sized animal, and then came on to be a land animal and it kept on evolving, and from this was man."

Scopes says in his autobiography that he had no recollection of ever teaching any of this. It's quite likely the kid was just committing flat-out perjury, but Scopes also suggests that

"Possibly they had read of the process of evolution and thought I had taught it to them."

Either way, nobody was going to object because Scopes had been in on this whole thing from the beginning. If nobody testified that he'd violated the Butler Act, they'd never get to test its constitutionality.

Darrow's cross-examination of Morgan seems to have focused largely on Morgan's claim that Scopes taught him that humans were classified as mammals, and trying to work out whether the kid understood what a mammal was.

"Do you remember what he said that made any animal a mammal, what it was or don't you remember?"
"I don't remember."
"But he said that all of them were mammals?"
"All what?"
"Dogs and horses, monkeys, cows, man, whales, I cannot state all of them, but he said all of those were Mammals?"
"Yes, sir; but I don't know about the whales; he said all these other ones."
"You might never have seen a whale suckling its young?"
"I did not."
"But the others were all mammals?"
"Yes, sir."

Et cetera.

Then Hays concluded by bringing the questioning back round to something related to the actual case. Asking about Civic Biology:

"Is there anything in this book that says man is descended from a monkey, you have read the book?"
"Yes, sir."
"That man descended from monkey?"
"No, sir; not that I know of."

Next up was Harry Shelton. He was nowhere near as detailed. The most he said is that Scopes taught him that "all forms of life come from a single cell". Which kind of works as a Butler Act violation, but doesn't have anywhere near the colourful scientific detail of what Howard Morgan described.

The best we get from him actually is from Darrow's questioning:

"Are you a church member?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you still belong?"
"Yes, sir."
"You didn't leave church when he told you all forms of life began with a single cell?"
"No, sir."
"That is all."

Then there F.E. Robinson, the local drugstore owner and school board chairman who had conspired with George Rappleyea to set the case up - and whose drugstore actually sold copies of Hunter's Civic Biology. Darrow's cross-examination was probably one of the most surreal parts of the proceedings yet, and mostly consisted of Darrow reading out the relevant parts of the book to try and find the bit where it violates the Butler Act. For an example:

"Over 500,000 species of animals are known to exist today, as the following table shows:

Protozoa: 8,000
Sponges: 2,500
Coelenterates: 4,500

I would rather you read this, I don't know whether you can read it?” Stewart replied: "I don't care whether you read it at all, or not." Darrow continued:

"Echinoderme: 4,000
Flatworms: 5,000
Roundworms: 1,500
Annelids: 4,000
Insects: 360,000
Myriapods: 2,000
Arachnids: 16,000
Crustaceans: 16,000
Mollusks: 61,000
Fishes: 13,000
Amphibians: 1,400
Reptiles: 3,500
Birds: 13,000
Mammals: 3,500
Total: 518,900"

It seems as if the prosecution had been assuming Civic Biology was much more explicit about human evolution than it actually was. It described evolution in general without explicitly referring to humans, and described how humans are classified as mammals, and in the same category of mammals as apes, but never actually explicitly said anything like 'humans evolved from a common ancestor shared with apes'.

Nonetheless, this seems to have been enough, along with the blatantly incriminating testimony from Scopes's students, to prove that Scopes had indeed taught human evolution.

Now it was the Defence's turn.

Scopes himself didn't testify. After all, the actual facts of the case weren't really in dispute. He had (or at least, he said he had) taught evolution from Hunter's Civic Biology. The defense instead would rely on expert testimony to demonstrate that teaching evolution in the way Scopes said he had couldn't be proven to be a violation of the Butler Act.

It still wasn't at all clear whether the testimony from the expert witnesses was going to be admissible, but the judge would hear what the testimony actually was, without the jury present, before making that decision.

First up, there was Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from Johns Hopkins University. He was also an upstanding and respectable Congregationalist church member, hardly the popular fundamentalist caricature of an Evolutionist (someone more like Clarence Darrow). After a lengthy grilling about his career, the defence got a soundbite out of him saying of his zoological colleagues that

"I am absolutely convinced from personal knowledge that anyone of these men feel and believe, as a matter of course, that evolution is a fact, but I doubt very much if any two of them agree as to the exact method by which evolution has been brought about, but I think there is, I know there is not a single one among them who has the least doubt of the fact of evolution."

Darrow got him to explain the origins of life, too. (Like a lot of Darrow's questioning, I'm not totally sure what this has to do with the case). Metcalf explained it well, in detail, with Darrow getting him to explicitly say that these processes have been going on for well over 6,000 years.

And then of course Darrow circled back to a question that came up in a cross-examination of another witness:

"Some animal life have gone from the earth to the sea, have they not?"
"Yes, some complex animals have gone back into the ocean, whales and the seal, and a great many of the water birds that spend a considerable portion of their life on the sea have gone back from the land. Of that we are entirely confident on abundant evidence."
"The whale (and I am diverting just a little because of some other matter that came up), the whale suckles its young, does it not?"
"Yes."
"And how is the whale classified?"
"The whale is a mammal."
"Will you give us the definition of mammal?"
"There again I hate to give definitions, but I can tell you some characteristics of mammals."
"All right."

The following section of the court transcript has the heading "Mammals Described". Metcalf continued.

"Mammals, all of them, have hair - either developed or rudimentary - on some part of their body. The possession of hair is a mammalian characteristic, hair not being known outside the group of mammals. The little hair-like feathers of birds are true feathers and not hair…"

And so on.

This ends up with Darrow getting Metcalf to say that humans are primates and related to monkeys, which I guess is kind of related to the case a bit, but the whale issue wasn't really necessary to get there.

And with the judge asking how much longer this was going to go on, Darrow promised just "three or four more questions". He finally wrapped up with asking Metcalf what the evidence was for the evolution of humans.

"The whole plan of evolution indicated so clearly throughout the whole realm of organic life paralleling as it does the whole plan of evolution seen so clearly in the universe as a whole makes a tremendous probability in favor of the evolution of man. When then we find just such differences among species and different varieties of men as we find among animals and when we find what we may fairly call the more lowly genera, species and varieties of humankind appearing earlier in the geological series just as do the simpler animals, among the lower forms appearing in the lower rocks, that inherent compulsion toward belief in evolution which is found in all of the universe is tremendously reinforced for man."

And, seemingly to the judge's relief, that was the end of day 4.

And that's also the end of this podcast episode. We'll save the rest of the trial for next time.

Thank you for listening, and thank you for waiting several weeks for this episode to come out. You've been listening to Science: A Peculiar History. You can find the podcast almost anywhere you get podcasts. You can find transcripts, images and sources for past episodes on the website, scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk. If you have any questions, comments, corrections or suggestions, you can message any of the podcast's social media channels, email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, or use the contact form on the website. Next time, we'll be continuing with the Trial of the Century.