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In this little volume I have endeavoured to present the life and work ofCharles Darwin viewed as a moment in a great revolution, in due relationboth to those who went before and to those who come after him.Recognising, as has been well said, that the wave makes the crest, notthe crest the wave, I have tried to let my hero fall naturally into hisproper place in a vast onward movement of the human intellect, of whichhe was himself at once a splendid product and a moving cause of thefirst importance. I have attempted to show him both as receiving thetorch from Lamarck and Malthus, and as passing it on with renewedbrilliancy to the wide school of evolutionary thinkers whom his work wasinstrumental in arousing to fresh and vigorous activity along a thousandseparate and varied lines of thought and action.

As Mr. Francis Darwin was already engaged upon a life of his father, Ishould have shrunk from putting[Pg iv] forth my own little book if I had notsucceeded in securing beforehand his kind sanction. That sanction,however, was at once so frankly and cordially given, that all myhesitation upon such a score was immediately laid aside; and as I havenecessarily had to deal rather with Darwin's position as a thinker andworker than with the biographical details of his private life, I trustthe lesser book may not clash with the greater, but to some extent maysupplement and even illustrate it.

Treating my subject mainly as a study in the interaction of organism andenvironment, it has been necessary for me frequently to introduce thenames of living men of science side by side with some of those who havemore or less recently passed away from among us. For uniformity's sake,as well as for brevity's, I have been compelled, in every instancealike, to omit the customary conventional handles. I trust those whothus find themselves docked of their usual titles of respect will kindlyremember that the practice is in fact adoptedhonoris causâ; they arepaying prematurely the usual penalty of intellectual greatness.

My obligations to Professor Huxley, to Professor Fiske, to Mr. HerbertSpencer, to Professor Sachs, to Hermann Müller, to Dr. Krause, toCharles Darwin himself, and to many other historians and critics ofevolutionism, will be sufficiently obvious to all instructed[Pg v] readers,and are for the most part fully acknowledged already in the text. Itwould be absurd to overload so small and popularly written a book withreferences and authorities. I hope, therefore, that any other writers towhom I may inadvertently have neglected to confess my debts will kindlyrest satisfied with this general acknowledgment. There are, however,three persons in particular from whom I have so largely borrowed factsor ideas that I owe them more special and definite thanks. From Mr.Woodall's admirable paper on Charles Darwin, contributed to the'Transactions of the Shropshire Archæological Society,' I have takenmuch interesting information about my hero's immediate ancestry andearly days. From Mr. Samuel Butler, the author of 'Evolution Old andNew,' I have derived many pregnant suggestions with regard to the trueposition and meaning of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and the earlyessentially teleological evolutionists—suggestions which I am all themore anxious to acknowledge since I differ fundamentally from Mr. Butlerin his estimate of the worth of Charles Darwin's distinctive discoveryof natural selection. Finally, to Mr. Bates, the 'Naturalist on theAmazons,' I am indebted for several valuable items of information as tothe general workings of the pre-Darwinian evolutionary spirit.

In a book dealing so largely with a contemporary[Pg vi] movement, the historyof which has never yet been consecutively written down in full, orsubjected as a whole to searching criticism, there must probably be manyerrors of detail, which can hardly be avoided under such circumstances.I have endeavoured to minimise them as far as possible. For those whichmay have escaped my own scrutiny I must trust both for correction andfor indulgence to the kindness of my readers.[Pg vii]

CHARLES DARWIN.

CHAPTER I.

THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN.

Charles Darwin was a great man, and he accomplished a great work. TheNewton of biology, he found the science of life a chaotic maze; he leftit an orderly system, with a definite plan and a recognisable meaning.Great men are not accidents; great works are not accomplished in asingle day. Both are the product of adequate causes. The great mansprings from an ancestry competent to produce him; he is the finalflower and ultimate outcome of converging hereditary forces, thatculminate at last in the full production of his splendid and exceptionalpersonality. The great work which it is his mission to perform in theworld is never wholly of his own inception. It also is the last effectof antecedent conditions, the slow result of tendencies and ideas longworking unseen or but little noticed beneath the surface of opinion, yetall gradually conspiring together towards the definitive revolution atwhose head, in the fulness of time, the as yet unborn genius is destinedto place himself. This is especially[Pg 2] the case with those extraordinarywaves of mental upheaval, one of which gave us the Italian renaissance,and another of which is actually in progress around us at the presentday. They have their sources deep down in the past of human thought andhuman feeling, and they are themselves but the final manifestation ofinnumerable energies which have long been silently agitating the soulsof nations in their profoundest depths.

Thus, every great man may be regarded as possessing two distinct linesof ancestry, physical and spiritual, each of which separately demandselucidation. He owes much in one way to his father and his mother, hisgrandfathers and his grandmothers, and his remoter progenitors, fromsome or all of whom he derives, in varying degrees and combinations, thepersonal qualities whose special interaction constitutes his greatnessand his idiosyncrasy; he owes much in another way to his intellectualand moral ancestors, the thinkers and workers who have preceded him inhis own department of thought or action, and have made possible in thecourse of ages the final development of his special revolution or hisparticular system. Viewed as an individual, he is what he is, with allhis powers and faculties and potentialities, in virtue of the brain, theframe, the temperament, the energy he inherits directly from his actualancestors, paternal and maternal; viewed as a factor or element in agreat movement, he is what he is because the movement had succeeded inreaching such and such a point in its progress already without him, andwaited only for such and such a grand and commanding personality inorder to carry it yet a step further on its course of development.[Pg 3]

No man who ever lived would more cordially have recognised these twoalternative aspects of the great worker's predetermining causes thanCharles Darwin. He knew well that the individual is the directcumulative product of his physical predecessors, and that he works andis worked upon in innumerable ways by the particular environment intowhose midst he is born. Let us see, then, in his own case what werethese two main sets of conditioning circumstances which finally led upto the joint production of Charles Darwin, the man and the philosopher,the thinking brain and the moving energy. In other words, what was thestate of the science of life at the time when he first began to observeand to speculate; and what was the ancestry which made him be born aperson capable of helping it forward at a single bound over its greatrestricting dogmatic barrier of the fixity of species?

Let us begin, in the first place, by clearing the path beforehand of apopular misconception, so extremely general and almost universal that,unless it be got rid of at the very outset of our sketch, much of thereal scope and purport of Darwin's life and work must, of necessity,remain entirely misunderstood by the vast mass of English readers. Inthe public mind Darwin is, perhaps, most commonly regarded as thediscoverer and founder of the evolution hypothesis. Two ideas areusually associated with his name and memory. It is believed that he wasthe first propounder of the theory which supposes all plant and animalforms to be the result, not of special creation, but of slowmodification in pre-existent organisms. It is further and moreparticularly believed that he was the first[Pg 4] propounder of the theorywhich supposes the descent of man to be traceable from a remote and moreor less monkey-like ancestor. Now, as a matter of fact, Darwin was notthe prime originator of either of these two great cardinal ideas. Thoughhe held both as part of his organised theory of things, he was not byany means the first or the earliest thinker to hold them or to propoundthem publicly. Though he gained for them both a far wider and moregeneral acceptance than they had ever before popularly received, he laidno sort of claim himself to originality or proprietorship in eithertheory. The grand idea which he did really originate was not the idea of'descent with modification,' but the idea of 'natural selection,' bywhich agency, as he was the first to prove, definite kinds of plants andanimals have been slowly evolved from simpler forms, with definiteadaptations to the special circumstances by which they are surrounded.In a word, it was the peculiar glory of Charles Darwin, not to havesuggested that all the variety of animal and vegetable life might havebeen produced by slow modifications in one or more original types, butto have shown the nature of the machinery by which such a result couldbe actually attained in the practical working out of natural causes. Hedid not invent the development theory, but he made it believable andcomprehensible. He was not, as most people falsely imagine, the Moses ofevolutionism, the prime mover in the biological revolution; he was theJoshua who led the world of thinkers and workers into full fruition ofthat promised land which earlier investigators had but dimly descriedfrom the Pisgah-top of conjectural speculation.[Pg 5]

How far Darwin's special idea of natural selection supplemented andrendered credible the earlier idea of descent with modification we shallsee more fully when we come to treat of the inception and growth of hisgreat epoch-making work, 'The Origin of Species;' for the present, itmust suffice to point out that in the world into which he was born, thetheory of evolution already existed in a more or less shadowy andundeveloped shape. And since it was his task in life to raise thistheory from the rank of a mere plausible and happy guess to the rank ofa highly elaborate and almost universally accepted biological system, wemay pause awhile to consider on the threshold what was the actual stateof natural science at the moment when the great directing and organisingintelligence of Charles Darwin first appeared.

From time immemorial, in modern Christendom at least, it had been thegeneral opinion of learned and simple alike that every species of plantor animal owed its present form and its original existence to a distinctact of special creation. Thisnaïf belief, unsupported as it was byany sort of internal evidence, was supposed to rest directly upon theexpress authority of a few obscure statements in the Book of Genesis.The Creator, it was held, had in the beginning formed each kind after aparticular pattern, had endowed it with special organs devised withsupreme wisdom for subserving special functions, and had bestowed uponit the mystical power of reproducing its like in its own image to allgenerations. No variation of importance ever occurred within the typesthus constituted; all plants and animals always retained their specialforms unaltered in any[Pg 6] way from era to era. This is the doctrine of thefixity and immutability of species, almost universal in the civilisedworld up to the end of the last century.

Improbable as such a crude idea now seems to any person even moderatelyacquainted with the extraordinary variety and variability of livingforms, it nevertheless contained nothing at all likely to contradict theordinary experience of the everyday observer in the last century. Thehandful of plants and animals with which he was personally acquaintedconsisted for the most part of a few large, highly advanced, andwell-marked forms, not in the least liable to be mistaken for oneanother even by the most hasty and casual spectator. A horse canimmediately be discriminated by the naked eye from a donkey, and a cowfrom a sheep, without risk of error; nobody is likely to confuse wheatwith barley, or to hesitate between classing any given fruit that islaid before him as a pear or an apple, a plum or a nectarine.Variability seldom comes under the notice of the ordinary passingspectator as it does under that of the prying and curious scientificobserver; and when it comes at all, as in the case of dogs and pigeons,roses and hyacinths, it is no doubt set down carelessly on a superficialview as a mere result of human selection or of deliberate mongrelinterbreeding. To the eye of the average man, all the living objectsordinarily perceived in external nature fall at once under certain fixedand recognisable kinds, as dogs and horses, elms and ashes, whose limitshe is never at all inclined to confound in any way one with the other.

Linnæus, the great father of modern scientific[Pg 7] biology, had frankly andperhaps unthinkingly accepted this current and almost universal dogma ofthe fixity and immutability of species. Indeed, by defining a kind as agroup of plants or animals so closely resembling one another as to giverise to the belief that they might all be descended from a singleancestor or pair of ancestors, he implicitly gave the new sanction ofhis weighty authority to the creation hypothesis, and to the prevalentdoctrine of the unchangeability of organic forms. To Linnæus, thespecies into which he mapped out all the plants and animals then known,appeared as the descendants each of a solitary progenitor or of aprimitive couple, called into existence at the beginning of all thingsby the direct fiat of a designing Creator. He saw the world of organiclife as composed of so many well-demarcated types, each separate,distinct, and immutable, each capable of producing its likeadinfinitum, and each unable to vary from its central standard in any ofits individuals, except perhaps within very narrow and unimportantlimits.

But towards the close of the eighteenth century, side by side with thegeneral awakening of the human intellect and the arrival of a new era offree social investigation, which culminated in a fresh order of things,there was developed a more critical and sceptical attitude in the worldof science, which soon produced a notable change of front among thinkingnaturalists as to the origin and meaning of specific distinctions.

Buffon was the first great biological innovator who ventured, in verydoubtful and tentative language, to suggest the possibility of the riseof species from one[Pg 8] another by slow modification of ancestral forms.Essentially a popular essayist, writing in the volcanicpriest-suppressed France of theancien régime, during the inconsistentdays of Louis XV. and Louis XVI., when it was uncertain whether noveland heterodox opinions would bring down upon their author fame andreputation or the Sorbonne and the Bastille, Buffon was careful to puthis conjectural conclusions in a studiously guarded and often evenironical form. But time after time, in his great discursive work, the'Histoire Naturelle' (published in successive volumes between 1749 and1788), he recurs anew to the pregnant suggestion that plants and animalsmay not be bound by fixed and immovable limits of species, but mayfreely vary in every direction from a common centre, so that one kindmay gradually and slowly be evolved by natural causes from the type ofanother. He points out that, underlying all external diversities ofcharacter and shape, fundamental likenesses of type occur in manyanimals, which irresistibly suggest the novel notion of common descentfrom a single ancestor. Thus regarded, he says, not only the ass and thehorse (to take a particular passage) but even man himself, the monkeys,the quadrupeds, and all vertebrate animals, might be viewed as merelyforming divergent branches of one and the same great family tree. Everysuch family, he believed, whether animal or vegetable, might have sprungoriginally from a single stock, which after many generations had heredeveloped into a higher form, and there degenerated into a lower andless perfect type of organisation. Granting this—granting that naturecould by slow variation produce one species in the[Pg 9] course of directdescent from another unlike it (for example, the ass from the horse),then, Buffon observed, there was no further limit to be set to herpowers in this respect, and we might reasonably conclude that from asingle primordial being she has gradually been able in the course oftime to develop the whole continuous gamut of existing animal andvegetable life. To be sure, Buffon always saves himself from censure byan obvious afterthought—'But no; it is certain from revelation thatevery species was directly created by a separate fiat.' Thishalf-hearted and somewhat subrisive denial, however, must be takenmerely as a concession to the Sorbonne and to the fashionable exegesisof his own day; and, even so, the Sorbonne was too much in the end forthe philosophic thinker. He had once in his life at least to make hissubmission and demand pardon from the offended orthodoxy of the Parisfaculty.

The wave of thought and feeling, thus apologetically and tentativelystirred on the unruffled pond of eighteenth century opinion by thestartling plop of Buffon's little smooth-cut pebble, soon widened out onevery side in concentric circles, and affected with its wash the entireworld of biological science in every country. Before the close of theeighteenth century speculation as to the origin of species was rife inall quarters of Europe. In France itself, Geoffroy St. Hilaire,constitutionally cautious and undecided, but wide of view and free fromprejudice, came slowly to the conclusion, in 1795, that all species arereally derived by modification from one or more primitive types. InGermany, in the very same year, Goethe,[Pg 10] with the keen vision of thepoet and the calm eye of the philosopher uniquely combined, discernedindependently as by a lightning flash the identical idea of the originof kinds by modification of pre-existent organisms. 'We may assertwithout hesitation,' says that great nebulous thinker and observer,'that all the more perfect organic natures, such as fishes, amphibians,birds and mammals, with man at their head, were formed at first on oneoriginal type, which still daily changes and modifies its form bypropagation.' In England, twelve months earlier, Dr. Erasmus Darwin,Charles Darwin's grandfather (of whom more anon), published his'Zoonomia,' a treatise on the laws of animal life, in which he not onlyadopted Buffon's theory of the origin of species by evolution, but alsolaid down as the chief cause of such development the actions and needsof the animals themselves. According to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, animals cameto vary from one another chiefly because they were always altering theirhabits and voluntarily accommodating themselves to new actions andpositions in life. His work produced comparatively little effect uponthe world at large in his own time, but it had immense influence uponthe next great prophet of evolution, Lamarck, and through Lamarck onLyell, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the modern school ofevolutionists generally. We shall consider his views in greater detailwhen we pass from the spiritual to the physical antecedents of CharlesDarwin.

It was in 1801 that Lamarck first gave to the world his epoch-makingspeculations and suggestions on the origin of species; and from thatdate to the day of his[Pg 11] death, in 1831, the unwearied old philosophercontinued to devote his whole time and energy, in blindness and poverty,to the elucidation of this interesting and important subject. A bold,acute, and vigorous thinker, trained in the great school of Diderot andD'Alembert, with something of the vivid Celtic poetic imagination, and afearless habit of forming his own conclusions irrespective of common orpreconceived ideas, Lamarck went to the very root of the matter in themost determined fashion, and openly proclaimed in the face of frowningofficialism under the Napoleonic reaction his profound conviction thatall species, including man, were descended by modification from one ormore primordial forms. In Charles Darwin's own words, 'He first did theeminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change,in the organic as well as in the inorganic world, being the result oflaw and not of miraculous interposition. Lamarck seems to have beenchiefly led to his conclusion on the gradual change of species by thedifficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, by the almostperfect gradation of forms in certain groups, and by the analogy ofdomestic productions. With respect to the means of modification, heattributed something to the direct action of the physical conditions oflife, something to the crossing of already existing forms, and much touse and disuse, that is, to the effects of habit. To this latter agencyhe seems to attribute all the beautiful adaptations in nature—such asthe long neck of the giraffe for browsing on the branches of trees,' Hebelieved, in short, that animals had largely developed themselves, byfunctional effort followed by increased powers and abilities.[Pg 12]

Lamarck's great work, the 'Philosophie Zoologique,' though opposed bythe austere and formal genius of the immortal Cuvier—a reactionarybiological conservative and obscurantist, equal to the enormous task ofmapping out piecemeal with infinite skill and power the separateprovinces of his chosen science, but incapable of taking in all thebearings of the whole field at a single vivid and comprehensivesweep—Lamarck's great work produced a deep and lasting impression uponthe entire subsequent course of evolutionary thought in scientificEurope. True, owing to the retrograde tendencies of the First Empire, itcaused but little immediate stir at the precise moment of its firstpublication; but the seed it sowed sank deep, and, lying fallow long inmen's minds, bore fruit at last in the next generation with themarvellous fecundity of the germs of genius. Indeed, from the verybeginning of the present century, a ferment of inquiry on the subject ofcreation and evolution was everywhere obvious among speculativethinkers. The profound interest which Goethe took in the dispute on thisvery subject in the French Académie des Sciences between Cuvier andGeoffroy St. Hilaire, amid the thundering guns of a threatened Europeanconvulsion, was but a solitary symptom of the general stir whichpreceded the gestation and birth of the Darwinian hypothesis. It isimpossible to take up any scientific memoirs or treatises of the firsthalf of our own century without seeing at a glance how every mind ofhigh original scientific importance was permeated and disturbed by thefundamental questions aroused, but not fully answered, by Buffon,Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. In Lyell's letters and in Agassiz'slectures, in[Pg 13] the 'Botanic Journal' and the 'PhilosophicalTransactions,' in treatises on Madeira beetles and the Australian flora,we find everywhere the thoughts of men profoundly influenced in athousand directions by this universal evolutionary solvent and leaven.

And while the world of thought was thus seething and moving restlesslybefore the wave of ideas set in motion by these various independentphilosophers, another group of causes in another field was renderingsmooth the path beforehand for the future champion of the amendedevolutionism. Geology on the one hand and astronomy on the other weremaking men's minds gradually familiar with the conception of slownatural development, as opposed to immediate and miraculous creation.

The rise of geology had been rapid and brilliant. In the last century ithad been almost universally believed that fossil organisms were therelics of submerged and destroyed worlds, strange remnants of successiveterrible mundane catastrophes. Cuvier himself, who had rendered immenseservices to geological science by his almost unerring reconstructions ofextinct animals, remained a partisan of the old theory of constantcataclysms and fresh creations throughout his whole life; but Lamarck,here as elsewhere the prophet of the modern uniformitarian concept ofnature, had already announced his grand idea that the ordinary processof natural laws sufficed to account for all the phenomena of the earth'scrust. In England, William Smith, the ingenious land surveyor, riding upand down on his daily task over the face of the country, becameconvinced by his observations in[Pg 14] the first years of the present centurythat a fixed order of sequence could everywhere be traced among thevarious superincumbent geological strata. Modern scientific geologytakes its rise from the moment of this luminous and luminiferousdiscovery. With astonishing rapidity the sequence of strata waseverywhere noted, and the succession of characteristic fossils mappedout, with the result of showing, however imperfectly at first, that thehistory of organic life upon the globe had followed a slow and regularcourse of constant development. Immediately whole schools of eagerworkers employed themselves in investigating in separate detail thephenomena of these successive stages of unfolding life. Murchison, freshfrom the Peninsular campaign, began to study the dawn of organic historyin the gloom of the Silurian and Cambrian epochs. A group of lessarticulate but not less active workers like Buckland and Mantellperformed similar services for the carboniferous, the wealden, and thetertiary deposits. Sedgwick endeavoured to co-ordinate the whole rangeof then known facts into a single wide and comprehensive survey. De LaBeche, Phillips, and Agassiz added their share to the great work ofreconstruction. Last of all, among those who were contemporary and allbut coeval with Charles Darwin himself, Lyell boldly fought out thebattle of 'uniformitarianism,' proving, with all the accumulated weightof his encyclopædic and world-wide knowledge, that every known featureof geological development could be traced to the agency of causes now inaction, and illustrated by means of slow secular changes still actuallytaking place on earth before our very eyes.[Pg 15]

The influence of these novel conceptions upon the growth and spread ofevolutionary ideas was far-reaching and twofold. In the first place, thediscovery of a definite succession of nearly related organic forms,following one another with evident closeness through the various ages,inevitably suggested to every inquiring observer the possibility oftheir direct descent one from the other. In the second place, thediscovery that geological formations were not really separated each fromits predecessor by violent revolutions, but were the result of gradualand ordinary changes, discredited the old idea of frequent freshcreations after each catastrophe, and familiarised the minds of men ofscience with the alternative notion of slow and natural evolutionaryprocesses. The past was seen to be in effect the parent of the present;the present was recognised as the child of the past.

Current astronomical theories also pointed inevitably in the samedirection. Kant, whose supereminent fame as a philosopher has almostovershadowed his just claims as a profound thinker in physical science,had already in the third quarter of the eighteenth century arrived athis sublime nebular hypothesis, in which he suggested the possibledevelopment of stars, suns, planets, and satellites by the slowcontraction of very diffuse and incandescent haze-clouds. Thismagnificent cosmical conception was seized and adapted by the genius ofLaplace in his celestial system, and made familiar through his greatwork to thinking minds throughout the whole of Europe. In England it wasfurther modified and remodelled by Sir William Herschel, whose period ofactive investigation coincided in part with Charles[Pg 16] Darwin's earlyboyhood. The bearings of the nebular hypothesis upon the rise ofDarwinian evolutionism are by no means remote: the entire modernscientific movement forms, in fact, a single great organic whole, ofwhich the special doctrine of biological development is but a smallseparate integral part. All the theories and doctrines which go to makeit up display the one common trait that they reject the idea of directcreative interposition from without, and attribute the entire existingorder of nature to the regular unfolding of one undeviating continuouslaw.

Yet another factor in the intellectual stir and bustle of the time mustneeds be mentioned even in so short and cursory a sketch as this of thecauses which led to the Darwinian crisis. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, aclergyman of the Church of England, published the first edition of hisfamous and much-debated 'Essay on the Principle of Population.' Malthuswas the first person who ever called public attention to the tendency ofpopulation to increase up to the utmost limit of subsistence, as well asto the necessary influence of starvation in checking its furtherdevelopment beyond that point. Though his essay dealt only with thequestion of reproduction in human societies, it was clear that itpossessed innumerable analogies in every domain of animal and vegetablelife. The book ran through many successive editions with extraordinaryrapidity for a work of its class, it was fiercely attacked and bravelydefended, it caused an immense amount of discussion and debate, andbesides its marvellous direct influence as a germinal power upon thewhole subsequent course of politico-economical and sociological thought,it produced also a[Pg 17] remarkable indirect influence on the side current ofbiological and speculative opinion. In particular, as we shall morefully see hereafter, it had an immediate effect in suggesting to themind of the great naturalist who forms our present subject the embryoidea of 'natural selection.'

Such then was the intellectual and social world into which, early in thepresent century, Charles Darwin found himself born. Everywhere aroundhim in his childhood and youth these great but formless evolutionaryideas were brewing and fermenting. The scientific society of his eldersand of the contemporaries among whom he grew up was permeated with theleaven of Laplace and of Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel. Inquiry wasespecially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specificdistinctions among plants and animals. Those who believed in thedoctrine of Buffon and of the 'Zoonomia' and those who disbelieved init, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by thefar-reaching implications of that fundamental problem. On every sideevolutionism, in its crude form, was already in the air. Long beforeCharles Darwin himself published his conclusive 'Origin of Species,'every thinking mind in the world of science, elder and younger, wasdeeply engaged upon the self-same problem. Lyell and Horner in alternatefits were doubting and debating. Herbert Spencer had already franklyaccepted the new idea with the profound conviction ofa priorireasoning. Agassiz was hesitating and raising difficulties. Treviranuswas ardently proclaiming his unflinching adhesion. Oken was spinning inmetaphysical Germany his fanciful parodies of the Lamarckian[Pg 18]hypothesis. Among the depths of Brazilian forests Bates was reading thestory of evolution on the gauze-like wings of tropical butterflies.Under the scanty shade of Malayan palm-trees Wallace was independentlyspelling out in rude outline the very theory of survival of the fittest,which Charles Darwin himself was simultaneously perfecting and polishingamong the memoirs and pamphlets of his English study. Wollaston inMadeira was pointing out the strange adaptations of the curious localsnails and beetles. Von Buch in the Canaries was coming to theconclusion that varieties may be slowly changed into permanent species.Lecoq and Von Baer were gradually arriving, one by the botanical route,the other by the embryological, at the same opinion. Before CharlesDarwin was twenty, Dean Herbert had declared from the profound depth ofhis horticultural knowledge that kinds were only mere fixed sports; andPatrick Matthew, in the appendix to a work on 'Naval Timber,' hadcasually developed, without perceiving its importance, the actualdistinctive Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. Robert Chamberspublished in 1844 his 'Vestiges of Creation,' in which Lamarck's theorywas impressed and popularised under a somewhat spoilt and mistaken form:it was not till 1859 that the first edition of the 'Origin of Species'burst like a thunderbolt upon the astonished world of unprepared andunscientific thinkers.

This general attitude of interest and inquiry is of deep importance tothe proper comprehension of Charles Darwin's life and work, and that fortwo distinct reasons. In the first place, the universal stir and deepprying into evolutionary questions which everywhere existed[Pg 19] amongscientific men in his early days was naturally communicated to a ladborn of a scientific family, and inheriting directly in blood and bonethe biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus Darwin. In the secondplace, the existence of such a deep and wide-spread curiosity as toultimate origins, and the common prevalence of profound uniformitarianand evolutionary views among philosophers and thinkers, made theacceptance of Charles Darwin's particular theory, when it at lastarrived, a comparatively easy and certain matter, because by it thecourse of organic development was assimilated, on credible grounds, tothe course of all other development in general, as then already widelyrecognised. The first consideration helps us to account in part for theman himself; the second consideration helps us even more to account forthe great work which he was enabled in the end so successfully toaccomplish.[Pg 20]

CHAPTER II.

CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS.

From the environment let us turn to the individual; from the world inwhich the man moved to the man who moved in it, and was in time destinedto move it.

Who was he, and whence did he derive his exceptional energy andintellectual panoply?

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather, the first of the line in whom thedistinctive Darwinian strain of intellect overtly displayed itself, wasthe son of one Robert Darwin, a gentleman of Nottinghamshire, 'a personof curiosity,' with 'a taste for literature and science;' so that forfour generations at least, in the paternal line, the peculiar talents ofthe Darwin family had been highly cultivated in either direction. RobertDarwin was an early member of the Spalding Club, a friend of Stukeleythe antiquary, and an embryo geologist, after the fantastic,half-superstitious fashion of his own time. Of his four sons, bothRobert, the eldest, and Erasmus, the youngest, were authors andbotanists. Erasmus himself was a Cambridge man, and his natural bent ofmind and energy led him irresistibly on to the study of medicine. Takinghis medical degree at his own university, and afterwards preparing forpractice by attending[Pg 21] Hunter's lectures in London, besides goingthrough the regular medical course at Edinburgh, the young doctorfinally settled down as a physician at Nottingham, whence shortlyafterward he removed to Lichfield, then the centre of a famous literarycoterie. So large a part of Charles Darwin's remarkable idiosyncrasy wasderived by heredity from his paternal grandfather, that it may be worthwhile to dwell a little here in passing on the character and career ofthis brilliant precursor of the great evolutionist. Both in the physicaland in the spiritual sense, Erasmus Darwin was one among the truest andmost genuine ancestors of his grandson Charles.

A powerful, robust, athletic man, in florid health and of temperatehabits, yet with the full-blooded tendency of the eighteenth centuryvividly displayed in his ample face and broad features, Erasmus Darwinbubbled over with irrepressible vivacity, the outward and visible signof that overflowing energy which forms everywhere one of the most markeddetermining conditions of high genius. Strong in body and strong inmind, a teetotaler before teetotalism, an abolitionist before theanti-slavery movement, he had a great contempt for weaknesses andprejudices of every sort, and he rose far superior to the age in whichhe lived in breadth of view and freedom from preconceptions. Theeighteenth century considered him, in its cautious, cut-and-driedfashion, a man of singular talent but of remarkably eccentric and unsafeopinions. Unfortunately for his lasting fame, Dr. Darwin was much givento writing poetry; and this poetry, though as ingenious as everythingelse he did, had a certain false gallop of[Pg 22] verse about it which hasdoomed it to become since Canning's parody a sort of warning beaconagainst the worst faults of the post-Augustan decadence in theten-syllabled metre. Nobody now reads the 'Botanic Garden' except eitherto laugh at its exquisite extravagances, or to wonder at the queertinsel glitter of its occasional clever rhetorical rhapsodies.

But in his alternative character of philosophic biologist, rejected bythe age which swallowed his poetry all applausive, Erasmus Darwin iswell worthy of the highest and deepest respect, as a prime founder andearly prophet of the evolutionary system. His 'Zoonomia,' 'which, thoughingenious, is built upon the most absurd hypothesis'—as men still saidonly thirty years ago—contains in the germ the whole theory of organicdevelopment as understood up to the very moment of the publication ofthe 'Origin of Species.' In it Dr. Darwin calls attention to 'the greatchanges introduced into various animals by artificial or accidentalcultivation,' a subject afterwards fully elucidated by his greatergrandson in his work on 'The Variation of Animals and Plants underDomestication.' He specially notes 'the immense changes of shape andcolour' produced by man in rabbits and pigeons, the very species onwhich Charles Darwin subsequently made some of his most remarkable andinteresting observations. More than any previous writer, Erasmus Darwin,with 'prophetic sagacity,' insisted strongly on the essential unity ofparent and offspring—a truth which lies at the very base of all modernphilosophical biology. 'Owing to the imperfection of language,' wrotethe Lichfield doctor nearly a hundred years ago,[Pg 23] 'the offspring istermed a new animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of theparent, since a part of the embryon-animal is or was a part of theparent, and therefore may retain some of the habits of the parentsystem.' He laid peculiar stress upon the hereditary nature of someacquired properties, such as the muscles of dancers or jugglers, and thediseases incidental to special occupations. Nay, he even anticipated hisgreat descendant in pointing out that varieties are often produced atfirst as mere 'sports' or accidental variations, as in the case ofsix-fingered men, five-clawed fowls, or extra-toed cats, and areafterwards handed down by heredity to succeeding generations. CharlesDarwin would have added that if these new stray peculiarities happenedto prove advantageous to the species they would be naturally favoured inthe struggle for existence, while if they proved disadvantageous, oreven neutral, they would die out at once or be bred out in the course ofa few crosses. That last truth of natural selection was the onlycardinal one in the evolutionary system on which Erasmus Darwin did notactually forestall his more famous and greater namesake. For its fullperception, the discovery of Malthus had to be collated with thespeculations of Buffon.

'When we revolve in our minds,' says the eighteenth century prophet ofevolution, 'the great similarity of structure which obtains in all thewarm-blooded animals, as well quadrupeds, birds, and amphibious animals,as in mankind; from the mouse and bat to the elephant and whale; one isled to conclude that they have alike been produced from a similar livingfilament. In some this filament in its advance to maturity has acquired[Pg 24]hands and fingers with a fine sense of touch, as in mankind. In othersit has acquired claws or talons, as in tigers and eagles. In others,toes with an intervening web or membrane, as in seals and geese. Inothers it has acquired cloven hoofs, as in cows and swine; and wholehoofs in others, as in the horse: while in the bird kind this originalliving filament has put forth wings instead of arms or legs, andfeathers instead of hair.' This is a very crude form of evolutionismindeed, but it is leading up by gradual stages to the finished andall-sided philosophy of physical life, which at last definitelyformulates itself through the mouth of Charles Darwin. We shall seehereafter wherein Erasmus Darwin's conception of development chieflyfailed—in attributing evolution for the most part to the exertions andendeavours of the animal itself, rather than to inevitable survival ofthe fittest among innumerable spontaneous variations—but we must atleast conclude our glimpse of his pregnant and suggestive work byquoting its great fundamentalaperçu:—'As the earth and ocean wereprobably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence ofanimals, and many families of these animals long before other familiesof them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of livingfilament is and has been the cause of all organic life?'

A few lines from the 'Temple of Nature,' one of Erasmus Darwin's poeticrhapsodies, containing his fully matured views on the origin of livingcreatures, may be worth reproduction in further elucidation of hisphilosophical position:[Pg 25]—

'Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born, and nursed in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass.
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.'

Have we not here the very beginnings of Charles Darwin? Do we not see,in these profound and fundamental suggestions, not merely hints as tothe evolution of evolution, but also as to the evolution of theevolutionist?

On the other hand, though Erasmus Darwin defined a fool to his friendEdgeworth as 'a man who never tried an experiment in his life,' he waswanting himself in the rigorous and patient inductive habit which sostrikingly distinguished his grandson Charles. That trait, as we shallpresently see, the biological chief of the nineteenth century derived inall probability from another root of his genealogical tree. ErasmusDarwin gave us brilliant suggestions rather than cumulative proof: heapologised in his 'Zoonomia' for 'many conjectures not supported byaccurate investigation or conclusive experiments,' Such an apology wouldhave been simply impossible to the painstaking spirit of his grandsonCharles.

Erasmus Darwin was twice married. His first wife was Mary, daughter ofMr. Charles Howard, of Lichfield, and it was her son, Robert WaringDarwin, who became the father of our hero, Charles. It is fashionable tosay, in this and sundry other like cases, that the mental energy skips ageneration. People have said so[Pg 26] in the case of that intermediateMendelssohn who was son of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher, andfather of Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn, the composer—that mere link in amarvellous chain who was wont to observe of himself in the decline oflife, that in his youth he was called the son of the great Mendelssohn,and in his old age the father of the great Mendelssohn. As a matter offact, one may fairly doubt whether such a case of actual skipping isever possible in the nature of things. In the particular instance ofRobert Waring Darwin at least we may be pretty sure that the distinctiveDarwinian strain of genius lay merely latent rather than dormant: thatit did not display itself to the world at large, but that it persistedsilently as powerful as ever within the remote recesses of the thinkingorganism. Not every man brings out before men all that is within him.Robert Waring Darwin was a physician at Shrewsbury; and he attained atleast sufficient scientific eminence in his own time to become a Fellowof the Royal Society, in days when that honour was certainly not readilyconferred upon country doctors of modest reputation. Charles Darwin saysof him plainly, 'He was incomparably the most acute observer whom I everknew.' It may well have been that Robert Darwin lived and died, as hisfamous son lived for fifty years of his great life, in comparativesilence and learned retirement; for we must never forget that if CharlesDarwin had only completed the first half century of his laboriousexistence, he would have been remembered merely as the author of anentertaining work on the voyage of the 'Beagle,' a plausible theory ofcoral islands, and a[Pg 27] learned monograph on the fossil barnacles. Duringall those years, in fact, he had really done little else than collectmaterial for the work of his lifetime. If we judge men by outwardperformance only, we may often be greatly mistaken in our estimates:potentiality is wider than actuality; what a man does is never a certainor extreme criterion of what he can do.

The Darwins, indeed, were all a mighty folk, of varied powers and variedattainments. Erasmus's brother, Robert, was the author of a work onbotany, which long enjoyed a respectable repute. Of his sons, one, SirFrancis Darwin, was noted as a keen observer of animals; a second,Charles, who died at twenty-one, was already the author of a veryvaluable medical essay; while the third, Robert, was the ShrewsburyF.R.S., the father of our great evolutionary thinker. And among CharlesDarwin's own cousins, one is Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, the philologist; asecond was the late Sir Henry Holland; and a third is Mr. FrancisGalton, the author of that essentially Darwinian book, 'HereditaryGenius.'

Robert Waring Darwin took to himself a wife from another very great andeminent family. He married Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of JosiahWedgwood, the famous potter; and from these two silent representativesof powerful stocks, Charles Robert Darwin, the father of modernevolutionary biology, was born at Shrewsbury, on February the 12th,1809. That Wedgwood connection, again, is no mere casual or unimportantincident in the previous life-history of the Darwinian originality; itthrows a separate clear light of its own[Pg 28] upon the peculiar andadmirably compounded idiosyncrasy of Charles Darwin.

A man, indeed, owes on the average quite as much to his mother's as tohis father's family. It is a mere unscientific old-world prejudice whichmakes us for the most part count ancestry in the direct ascending maleline alone, to the complete neglect of the equally important maternalpedigree. Prom the biological point of view, at least, every individualis a highly complex compound of hereditary elements, a resultant ofnumerous converging forces, a meeting place of two great streams ofinheritance, each of which is itself similarly made up by the likeconfluence of innumerable distinct prior tributaries. Between these twoit is almost impossible for us accurately to distribute any givenindividuality. How much Charles Darwin owed to the Darwins, and how muchhe owed in turn to the Wedgwoods, no man is yet psychologist enough orphysiologist enough to say. But that he owed a great deal to eitherstrong and vigorous strain we may even now quite safely take forgranted.

The Wedgwood family were 'throwers' by handicraft, superior artisanslong settled at Burslem, in the Staffordshire potteries. Josiah, theyoungest of thirteen children, lamed by illness in early life, wasturned by this happy accident from his primitive task as a 'thrower' tothe more artistic and original work of producing ornamental colouredearthenware. Skilful and indefatigable, of indomitable energy and withgreat powers of forcing his way in life against all obstacles, youngWedgwood rose rapidly by his own unaided exertions to be a masterpotter, and a manufacturer of[Pg 29] the famous unglazed black porcelain.Those were the darkest days of industrial art and decorative handicraftin modern England. Josiah Wedgwood, by his marked originality and forceof character, succeeded in turning the current of national taste, andcreating among us a new and distinctly higher type of artisticworkmanship. His activity, however, was not confined to his art alone,but found itself a hundred other different outlets in the most varieddirections. When his potteries needed enlargement to meet the increaseddemand, he founded for the hands employed upon his works the modelindustrial village of Etruria. When Brindley began cutting artificialwaterways across the broad face of central England, it was in the greatpotter that he found his chief ally in promoting the construction of theGrand Trunk Canal. Wedgwood, indeed, was a builder of schools and amaker of roads; a chemist and an artist; a friend of Watt and anemployer of Flaxman. In short, like Erasmus Darwin, he possessed thatprime essential in the character of genius, an immense underlying stockof energy. And with it there went its best concomitant, the 'infinitecapacity for taking pains.' Is it not probable that in their jointdescendant, the brilliant but discursive and hazardous genius of ErasmusDarwin was balanced and regulated by soberer qualities inheriteddirectly from the profound industry of the painstaking potter? Whenlater on we find Charles Darwin spending hours in noting the successivemovements of the tendrils in a plant, or watching for long years thehabits and manners of earthworms in flower-pots, may we not reasonablyconjecture that he derived no little share of his extraordinary[Pg 30]patience, carefulness, and minuteness of handicraft from his mother'sfather, Josiah Wedgwood?

Such, then, were the two main component elements, paternal and maternal,from which the striking personality of Charles Darwin was no doubt forthe most part ultimately built up.[Pg 31]

CHAPTER III.

EARLY DAYS.

As the Chester express steams out of Shrewsbury station, you see on yourleft, overhanging the steep bank of Severn, a large, square,substantial-looking house, known as the Mount, the birthplace of theauthor of the 'Origin of Species.' There, in the comfortable home he hadbuilt for himself, Dr. Robert Darwin, the father, lived and worked forfifty years of unobtrusive usefulness. He had studied medicine atEdinburgh and Leyden, and had even travelled a little in Germany, beforehe settled down in the quiet old Salopian town, where for half a centuryhis portly figure and yellow chaise were familiar objects of thecountry-side for miles around. Among a literary society which includedColeridge's friends, the Tayleurs, and where Hazlitt listened withdelight to the great poet's 'music of the spheres,' in High StreetUnitarian Chapel, the Mount kept up with becoming dignity the familytraditions of the Darwins and the Wedgwoods as a local centre ofsweetness and light.

On February the 12th, 1809, Charles Darwin first saw the light of day inthis his father's house at Shrewsbury. Time and place were bothpropitious. Born in[Pg 32] a cultivated scientific family, surrounded from hisbirth by elevating influences, and secured beforehand from the crampingnecessity of earning his own livelihood by his own exertions, the boywas destined to grow up to full maturity in the twenty-one years of slowdevelopment that immediately preceded the passing of the first ReformAct. The thunder of the great European upheaval had grown silent atWaterloo when he was barely six years old, and his boyhood was passedamid country sights and sounds during that long period of reconstructionand assimilation which followed the fierce volcanic outburst of theFrench Revolution. Happy in the opportunity of his birth, he came uponthe world eight years after the first publication of Lamarck'sremarkable speculations, and for the first twenty-two years of his lifehe was actually the far younger contemporary of the great Frenchevolutionary philosopher. Eleven years before his arrival upon the sceneMalthus had set forth his 'Principle of Population.' Charles Darwin thusentered upon a stage well prepared for him, and he entered it with anidiosyncrasy exactly adapted for making the best of the situation. Thesoil had been thoroughly turned and dressed beforehand: Charles Darwin'sseed had only to fall upon it in order to spring up and bear fruit ahundredfold, in every field of science or speculation.

For it was not biology alone that he was foredoomed to revolutionise,but the whole range of human thought, and perhaps even ultimately ofhuman action.

Is it mere national prejudice which makes one add with congratulatorypleasure that Darwin was born in England, rather than in France, inGermany, or in[Pg 33] America? Perhaps so; perhaps not. For the Englishintellect does indeed seem more capable than most of uniting highspeculative ability with high practical skill and experience: and ofthat union of rare qualities Darwin himself was a most conspicuousexample. It is probable that England has produced more of the greatorganising and systematising intellects than any other modern country.

Among those thinkers in his own line who stood more nearly abreast ofDarwin in the matter of age, Lyell was some eleven years his senior, andcontributed not a little (though quite unconsciously) by his work andconclusions to the formation of Darwin's own peculiar scientificopinions. The veteran Owen, who still survives him, was nearly fiveyears older than Darwin, and also helped to a great extent in givingform and exactness to his great contemporary's anatomical ideas.Humboldt, who preceded our English naturalist in the matter of time byno less than forty years, might yet almost rank as coeval in somerespects, owing to his long and active life, his late maturity, and thevery recent date of his greatest and most thought-compelling work, the'Cosmos' (begun when Humboldt was seventy-five, and finished when helacked but ten years of his century), in itself a sort of preparationfor due acceptance of the Darwinian theories. In fact, as many as fiftyyears of their joint lives coincided entirely one with the other's.Agassiz antedated Darwin by two years. On the other hand, among the menwho most helped on the recognition of Darwin's theories, Hooker andLewes were his juniors by eight years, Herbert Spencer by eleven,Wallace by thirteen, and Huxley[Pg 34] by sixteen. His cousin, Francis Galton,another grandson of Erasmus Darwin, and joint inheritor of thedistinctive family biological ply, was born at the same date as AlfredRussell Wallace, thirteen years after Charles Darwin. In such a goodlygalaxy of workers was the Darwinian light destined to shine through themiddle of the century, as one star excelleth another in glory.

Charles Darwin was the second son: but nature refuses doggedly toacknowledge the custom of primogeniture. His elder brother, Erasmus, aman of mute and inarticulate ability, with a sardonic humour alien tohis race, extorted unwonted praise from the critical pen of ThomasCarlyle, who 'for intellect rather preferred him to his brotherCharles.' But whatever spark of the Darwinian genius was really innatein Erasmus the Less died with him unacknowledged.

The boy was educated (so they call it) at Shrewsbury Grammar School,under sturdy Sam Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield; and there hepicked up so much Latin and Greek as was then considered absolutelyessential to the due production of an English gentleman. Happily for theworld, having no taste for the classics, he escaped the ordeal withlittle injury to his individuality. His mother had died while he wasstill a child, but his father, that 'acute observer,' no doubt taughthim to know and love nature. At sixteen he went to Edinburgh University,then rendered famous by a little knot of distinguished professors, andthere he remained for two years. Already at school he had made himselfnotable by his love of collecting—the first nascent symptom of thenaturalist bent. He collected everything, shells, eggs,[Pg 35] minerals,coins, nay, since postage stamps were then not yet invented, evenfranks. But at Edinburgh he gave the earliest distinct evidence of hisdefinite scientific tastes by contributing to the local academic societya paper on the floating eggs of the common sea-mat, in which he had eventhen succeeded in discovering for the first time organs of locomotion.Thence he proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge. The Darwins wereluckily a Cambridge family: luckily, let us say, for had it beenotherwise—had young Darwin been distorted from his native bent by Platoand Aristotle, and plunged deep into the mysteries of Barbara andCelarent, as would infallibly have happened to him at the sisteruniversity—who can tell how long we might have had to wait in vain forthe 'Origin of Species' and the 'Descent of Man'? But Cambridge, whichrejoiced already in the glory of Newton, was now to match it by theglory of Darwin. In its academical course, the mathematical wedge hadalways kept open a dim passage for physical science; and at the exactmoment when Darwin was an undergraduate at Christ's—from 1827 to1831—the university had the advantage of several good scientificteachers, and amongst them one, Professor Henslow, a well-knownbotanist, who took a special interest in young Darwin's intellectualdevelopment. There, too, he met with Sedgwick, Airy, Ramsay, andnumerous other men of science, whose intercourse with him must no doubthave contributed largely to mould and form the future cast of hispeculiar philosophical idiosyncrasy.

It was to Henslow's influence that Darwin in later years attributed ingreat part his powerful taste for[Pg 36] natural history. But in truth theascription of such high praise to his early teacher smacks too much ofthe Darwinian modesty to be accepted at once without demur by the candidcritic. The naturalist, like the poet, is born, not made. How much more,then, must this needs be the case with the grandson of Erasmus Darwinand of Josiah Wedgwood? As a matter of fact, already at Edinburgh thelad had loved to spend his days among the sea-beasts and wrack of theInches in the Firth of Forth; and it was through the instrumentality ofhis 'brother entomologists' that he first became acquainted with Henslowhimself when he removed to Cambridge. The good professor could not makehim into a naturalist: inherited tendencies and native energies had donethat for him already from his very cradle.

'Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam;' and it was well that Darwin took upat Cambridge with the study of geology as his first love. For geologywas then the living and moving science, as astronomy had been in thesixteenth century, and as biology is at the present day—thegrowing-point, so to speak, of European development, whence all greatthings might naturally be expected. Moreover, it was and is the centralscience of the concrete class, having relations with astronomy on theone hand, and with biology on the other; concerned alike with cosmicalchances or changes on this side, and with the minutest facts of organicnature on that; the meeting-place and border-land of all the separatebranches of study that finally bear upon the complex problems of ourhuman life. No other subject of investigation was so well calculated torouse Darwin's interest in the ultimate questions of evolution orcreation,[Pg 37] of sudden cataclysm or gradual growth, of miraculousintervention or slow development. Here, if anywhere, his enigmas wereall clearly propounded to him by the inarticulate stony sphinxes; he hadonly to riddle them out for himself as he went along in after years withthe aid of the successive side-lights thrown upon the world by theunconnected lanterns of Lamarck and of Malthus.

Fortunately for us, then, Darwin did not waste his time at Cambridgeover the vain and frivolous pursuits of the classical tripos. Hepreferred to work at his own subjects in his own way, and to leave theshort-lived honours of the schools to those who cared for them and fornothing higher. He came out with theοἱ πολλοί in 1831, andthenceforth proceeded to study life in the wider university for whichhis natural inclinations more properly fitted him. The world was allbefore him where to choose, and he chose that better part which shallnot be taken away from him as long as the very memory of sciencesurvives.[Pg 38]

CHAPTER IV.

DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS.

Scarcely had Darwin taken his pass degree at Cambridge when the greatevent of his life occurred which, more than anything else perhaps, gavethe final direction to his categorical genius in the line it wasthenceforth so successfully to follow. In the autumn of 1831, whenDarwin was just twenty-two, it was decided by Government to send aten-gun brig, the 'Beagle,' under command of Captain Fitzroy, tocomplete the unfinished survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, to mapout the shores of Chili and Peru, to visit several of the Pacificarchipelagoes, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements roundthe whole world. This was an essentially scientific expedition, andCaptain Fitzroy, afterwards so famous as the meteorological admiral, wasa scientific officer of the highest type. He was anxious to beaccompanied on his cruise by a competent naturalist who would undertakethe collection and preservation of the animals and plants discovered onthe voyage, for which purpose he generously offered to give up a shareof his own cabin accommodation. Professor Henslow seized upon theopportunity to recommend for the post his promising pupil, young Darwin,'grandson of the poet.' Darwin gladly volunteered his services without[Pg 39]salary, and partly paid his own expenses on condition of being permittedto retain in his own possession the animals and plants he collected onthe journey. The 'Beagle' set sail from Devonport on December the 27th,1831; she returned to Falmouth on October the 2nd, 1836.

That long five years' cruise around the world, the journal of whichDarwin has left us in the 'Voyage of the "Beagle,"' proved a marvellousepoch in the great naturalist's quiet career. It left its abiding markdeeply imprinted on all his subsequent life and thinking. Lamarck andErasmus Darwin were cabinet biologists, who had never beheld with theirown eyes the great round world and all that therein is; Charles Darwinhad the inestimable privilege of seeing for himself, at first hand, alarge part of the entire globe and of the creatures that inhabit it.Even to have caught one passing glimpse of the teeming life of thetropics is in itself an education; to the naturalist it is more, it is arevelation. Our starved little northern fauna and flora, the mereleavings of the vast ice sheets that spread across our zone in theglacial epoch, show us a world depopulated of all its largest,strangest, and fiercest creatures; a world dwarfed in all its componentelements, and immensely differing in ten thousand ways from that rich,luxuriant, over-stocked hot-house in which the first great problems ofevolution were practically worked out by survival of the fittest. Butthe tropics preserve for us still in all their jungles something of thetangled, thickly-peopled aspect which our planet must have presented forcountless ages in all latitudes before the advent of primæval man. Wenow know that[Pg 40] throughout the greater part of geological time,essentially tropical conditions existed unbroken over the whole surfaceof the entire earth, from the Antarctic continent to the shores ofGreenland; so that some immediate acquaintance at least with theequatorial world is of immense value to the philosophical naturalist forthe sake of the analogies it inevitably suggests; and it is asignificant fact that almost all those great and fruitful thinkers whoin our own time have done good work in the wider combination ofbiological facts have themselves passed a considerable number of yearsin investigating the conditions of tropical nature. Europe and Englandare at the ends of the earth; the tropics are biological head-quarters.The equatorial zone is therefore the true school for the historian oflife in its more universal and lasting aspects.

Nor was that all. The particular countries visited by the 'Beagle'during the course of her long and varied cruise happened to be exactlysuch as were naturally best adapted for bringing out the latentpotentialities of Darwin's mind, and suggesting to his active andreceptive brain those deep problems of life and its environment which heafterwards wrought out with such subtle skill and such consummatepatience in the 'Origin of Species' and the 'Descent of Man.' The Capede Verdes, and the other Atlantic islands, with their scanty populationof plants and animals, composed for the most part of waifs and straysdrifted to their barren rocks by ocean currents, or blown out helplesslyto sea by heavy winds; Brazil, with its marvellous contrasting wealth oftropical luxuriance and self-strangling fertility, a new province ofinterminable[Pg 41] delights to the soul of the enthusiastic young collector;the South American pampas, with their colossal remains of extinctanimals, huge geological precursors of the stunted modern sloths andarmadillos that still inhabit the self-same plains; Tierra del Fuego,with its almost Arctic climate, and its glimpses into the secrets of themost degraded savage types; the vast range of the Andes and theCordilleras, with their volcanic energy and their closely crowdedhorizontal belts of climatic life; the South Sea Islands, thoseparadises of the Pacific, Hesperian fables true, alike for the lover ofthe picturesque and the biological student; Australia, that survivingfragment of an extinct world, with an antiquated fauna whose archaiccharacter still closely recalls the European life of ten million yearsback in the secondary epoch: all these and many others equally novel andequally instructive passed in long alternating panorama before Darwin'seyes, and left their images deeply photographed for ever after on thelasting tablets of his retentive memory. That was the real greatuniversity in which he studied nature and read for his degree. Ourevolutionist was now being educated.

Throughout the whole of the journal of this long cruise, which Darwinafterwards published in an enlarged form, it is impossible not to bestruck at every turn with the way in which his inquisitive mind againand again recurs to the prime elements of those great problems towardswhose solution he afterwards so successfully pointed out the path. TheDarwinian ideas are all already there in the germ; the embryo form ofthe 'Origin of Species' plays in and[Pg 42] out on every page with thequaintest elusiveness. We are always just on the very point of catchingit; and every now and again we do actually all but catch it in essenceand spirit, though ever still its bodily shape persistently evades us.Questions of geographical distribution, of geological continuity, of theinfluence of climate, of the modifiability of instinct, of the effectsof surrounding conditions, absorb the young observer's vivid interest atevery step, wherever he lands. He is all unconsciously collecting notesand materials in profuse abundance for his great work; he is thinking inrough outline the new thoughts which are hereafter to revolutionise thethought of humanity.

Five years are a great slice out of a man's life: those five years ofceaseless wandering by sea and land were spent by Charles Darwin inaccumulating endless observations and hints for the settlement of theprofound fundamental problems in which he was even then so deeplyinterested. The 'Beagle' sailed from England to the Cape de Verdes, andalready, even before she had touched her first land, the youngnaturalist had observed with interest that the impalpably fine dustwhich fell on deck contained no less than sixty-seven distinct organicforms, two of them belonging to species peculiar to South America. Insome of the dust he found particles of stone so very big that theymeasured 'above the thousandth of an inch square;' and after this fact,says the keen student, 'one need not be surprised at the diffusion ofthe far lighter and smaller sporules of cryptogamic plants.' WouldErasmus Darwin have noticed these minute points and their implicationsone wonders? Probably not. May we not see in the observation[Pg 43] partly thehereditary tendencies of Josiah Wedgwood towards minute investigationand accuracy of detail, partly the influence of the scientifictime-wave, and the careful training under Professor Henslow? ErasmusDarwin comes before us rather as the brilliant and ingenious amateur,his grandson Charles as the instructed and fully equipped final productof the scientific schools.

At St. Paul's Rocks, once more, a mass of new volcanic peaks risingabruptly from the midst of the Atlantic, the naturalist of the 'Beagle'notes with interest that feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic insectsor spiders are the first inhabitants to take up their quarters onrecently formed oceanic islands. This problem of the peopling of newlands, indeed, so closely connected with the evolution of new species,necessarily obtruded itself upon his attention again and again duringhis five years' cruise; and in some cases, especially that of theGalapagos Islands, the curious insular faunas and floras which heobserved upon this trip, composed as they were of mere casual straylingsfrom adjacent shores, produced upon his mind a very deep and lastingimpression, whose traces one may without difficulty discern on everysecond page of the 'Origin of Species.'

On the last day of February, 1832, the 'Beagle' came to anchor in theharbour of Bahia, and young Darwin caught sight for the first time ofthe mutually strangling luxuriance of tropical vegetation. Nowhere onearth are the finest conditions of tropical life more fully realisedthan in the tangled depths of the great uncleared Brazilian forests,which everywhere gird round[Pg 44] like a natural palisade with theirimpenetrable belt the narrow and laborious clearings of over-masteredman. The rich alluvial silt of mighty river systems, the immemorialmanuring of the virgin soil, the fierce energy of an almost equatorialsun, and the universal presence of abundant water, combine to make lifein that marvellous region unusually wealthy, varied, and crowded, sothat the struggle for existence is there perhaps more directly visibleto the seeing eye than in any other known portion of God's universe.'Delight itself,' says Darwin in his journal, with that naive simplicitywhich everywhere forms the chief charm of his direct and unaffectedliterary style—'delight itself is a weak term to express the feelingsof a naturalist who for the first time has wandered by himself in aBrazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of theparasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of thefoliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filledme with admiration.' In truth, among those huge buttressed trunks,overhung by the unbroken canopy of foliage on the vast spreading andinterlacing branches, festooned with lianas and drooping lichens, orbeautified by the pendent alien growth of perfumed orchids, Darwin'smind must indeed have found congenial food for apt reflection, andinfinite opportunities for inference and induction. Prom the merepicturesque point of view, indeed, the naturalist enjoys such sights asthis a thousand times more truly and profoundly than the mere casualunskilled observer: for it is a shallow, self-flattering mistake ofvulgar and narrow minds to suppose that fuller knowledge and clearerinsight can destroy or impair the beauty of[Pg 45] beautiful objects—as whoshould imagine that a great painter appreciates the sunset less than asilly boy or a sentimental schoolgirl. As a matter of fact, thenaturalist knows and admires a thousand exquisite points of detail inevery flower and every insect which only he himself and the true artistcan equally delight in. And a keen intellectual and æsthetic joy in theglorious fecundity and loveliness of nature was everywhere present toDarwin's mind. But, beyond and above even that, there was also thearchitectonic delight of the great organiser in the presence of a nobleorganised product: the peculiar pleasure felt only by the man in whosebroader soul all minor details fall at once into their proper place, ascomponent elements in one great consistent and harmonious whole—asympathetic pleasure akin to that with which an architect views theinterior of Ely and of Lincoln, or a musician listens to the linkedharmonies of the 'Messiah' and the 'Creation.' The scheme of nature wasnow unfolding itself visibly and clearly before Charles Darwin's veryeyes.

After eighteen memorable days spent with unceasing delight at Bahia, the'Beagle' sailed again for Rio, where Darwin stopped for three months, toimprove his acquaintance with the extraordinary wealth of the SouthAmerican fauna and flora. Collecting insects was here his chiefoccupation, and it is interesting to note even at this early period howhis attention was attracted by some of those strange alluring devices onthe part of the males for charming their partners which afterwardsformed the principal basis for his admirable theory of sexual selection,so fully developed in the 'Descent of Man.' 'Several times,' he says,'when a pair [of[Pg 46] butterflies], probably male and female, were chasingeach other in an irregular course, they passed within a few yards of me;and I distinctly heard a clicking noise, similar to that produced by atoothed wheel passing under a spring catch.' In like manner he observedhere the instincts of tropical ants, the habits of phosphorescentinsects, and the horrid practice of that wasp-like creature, the sphex,which stuffs the clay cells of its larvæ full of half-dead spiders andwrithing caterpillars, so stung with devilish avoidance of vital partsas to be left quite paralysed yet still alive, as future food for thedeveloping grubs. Cases like these helped naturally to shake the youngbiologist's primitive faith in the cheap and crude current theories ofuniversal beneficence, and to introduce that wholesome scepticalreaction against received dogma which is the necessary ground-work anddue preparation for all great progressive philosophical thinking.

In July they set sail again for Monte Video, where the importantquestion of climate and vegetation began to interest young Darwin'smind. Uruguay is almost entirely treeless; and this curious phenomenon,in a comparatively moist sub-tropical plain-land, struck him as aremarkable anomaly, and set him speculating on its probable cause.Australia, he remembered, was far more arid, and yet its interior waseverywhere covered by whole forests of quaint indigenous gum-trees.Could it be that there were no trees adapted to the climate? As yet, thetrue causes of geographical distribution had not clearly dawned uponDarwin's mind; but that a young man of twenty-three should seriouslybusy himself about such problems of ultimate causation at all is[Pg 47] initself a sufficiently pointed and remarkable phenomenon. It was here,too, that he first saw that curious animal, the Tucutuco, a true rodentwith the habits of a mole, which is almost always found in a blindcondition. With reference to this singular creature, there occurs in hisjournal one of those interesting anticipatory passages which show therough workings of the distinctive evolutionary Darwinian concept in itsearlier stages. 'Considering the strictly subterranean habits of theTucutuco,' he writes, 'the blindness, though so common, cannot be a veryserious evil; yet it appears strange that any animal should possess anorgan frequently subject to be injured. Lamarck would have beendelighted with this fact, had he known it, when speculating (probablywith more truth than usual with him) on the gradually acquired blindnessof the Aspalax, a gnawer living under the ground, and of the Proteus, areptile living in dark caverns filled with water; in both of whichanimals the eye is in an almost rudimentary state, and is covered by atendinous membrane and skin. In the common mole the eye isextraordinarily small but perfect, though many anatomists doubt whetherit is connected with the true optic nerve; its vision must certainly beimperfect, though probably useful to the animal when it leaves itsburrow. In the Tucutuco, which I believe never comes to the surface ofthe ground, the eye is rather larger, but often rendered blind anduseless, though without apparently causing any inconvenience to theanimal: no doubt Lamarck would have said that the Tucutuco is nowpassing into the state of the Aspalax and Proteus.' The passage isinstructive both as showing[Pg 48] that Darwin was already familiar withLamarck's writings, and as pointing out the natural course of his ownfuture development.

For the two years from her arrival at Monte Video, the 'Beagle' wasemployed in surveying the eastern coast of South America; and Darwinenjoyed unusual opportunities for studying the geology, the zoology, andthe botany of the surrounding districts during all that period. It was asuggestive field indeed for the young naturalist. The curiousrelationship of the gigantic fossil armour-plated animals to theexisting armadillo, of the huge megatherium to the modern sloths, and ofthe colossal ant-eaters to their degenerate descendants at the presentday, formed one of the direct inciting causes to the special study whichproduced at last the 'Origin of Species.' In the Introduction to thatimmortal work Darwin wrote, some twenty-seven years later, 'When onboard H.M.S. "Beagle" as naturalist, I was much struck with certainfacts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting SouthAmerica, and in the geological relations of the present to the pastinhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in thelatter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the originof species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one ofour greatest philosophers.' And in the body of the work itself he refersover and over again to numberless observations made by himself duringthis period of rapid psychological development—observations on theabsence of recent geological formations along the lately upheaved SouthAmerican coast; on the strange extinction of the horse in La Plata; onthe affinities of the extinct and[Pg 49] recent species; on the effect ofminute individual peculiarities in preserving life under specialcircumstances; and on the influence of insects and blood-sucking bats indetermining the existence of the larger naturalised mammals in parts ofBrazil and the Argentine Republic. It was the epoch of wide collectionof facts, to be afterwards employed in brilliant generalisations: thematerials for the 'Origin of Species' were being slowly accumulated inthe numberless pigeon-holes of the Darwinian memory.

Among the facts thus industriously gathered by Darwin in the two yearsspent on the South American coast were several curious instincts of thecuckoo-like molothrus, of the owl of the Pampas, and of the Americanostrich. A few sentences scattered here and there through this part ofthe 'Naturalist's Journal' may well be extracted in the present place asshowing, better than any mere secondhand description could do, the slowgerminating process of the 'Origin of Species.' In speaking of thetoxodon, that strange extinct South American mammal, the young authorremarks acutely that, though in size it equalled the elephant and themegatherium, the structure of its teeth shows it to be closely allied tothe ruminants, while several other details link it to the pachyderms,and its aquatic peculiarities of ear and nostril approximate it ratherto the manatee and the dugong. 'How wonderfully,' he says, 'are thedifferent orders, at the present time so well separated, blendedtogether in different points of the structure of the toxodon.' We nowknow that unspecialised ancestral forms always display this close unionof peculiarities afterwards separately[Pg 50] developed in distinct species oftheir later descendants.

Still more pregnant with evolutionism in the bud is the prophetic remarkabout a certain singular group of South American birds, 'This smallfamily is one of those which, from its varied relations to otherfamilies, although at present offering only difficulties to thesystematic naturalist, ultimately may assist in revealing the grandscheme, common to the present and past ages, on which organised beingshave been created.' Of the agouti, once more, that true friend of thedesert, Darwin notes that it does not now range as far south as Port St.Julian, though Wood in 1670 found it abundant there; and he askssuggestively, 'What cause can have altered, in a wide, uninhabited, andrarely visited country, the range of an animal like this?' Again, whenspeaking of the analogies between the extinct camel-like macraucheniaand the modern guanaco, as well as of those between the fossil andliving species of South American rodents, he says, with even moreprophetic insight, 'This wonderful relationship in the same continentbetween the dead and the living will, I do not doubt, hereafter throwmore light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and theirdisappearance from it, than any other class of facts.' He was himselfdestined in another thirty years to prove the truth of his ownvaticination.

A yet more remarkable passage in the 'Journal of the "Beagle,"' thoughentered under the account of events observed in the year 1834, mustalmost certainly have been written somewhat later, and subsequently toDarwin's first reading of Malthus's momentous work,[Pg 51] 'The Principle ofPopulation,' which (as we know from his own pen) formed a cardinal pointin the great biologist's mental development. It runs as follows in thepublished journal:[1]—'We do not steadily bear in mind how profoundlyignorant we are of the conditions of existence of every animal; nor dowe always remember that some check is constantly preventing the toorapid increase of every organised being left in a state of nature. Thesupply of food, on an average, remains constant; yet the tendency inevery animal to increase by propagation is geometrical, and itssurprising effects have nowhere been more astonishingly shown than inthe case of the European animals run wild during the last few centuriesin America. Every animal in a state of nature regularly breeds; yet in aspecies long established any great increase in numbers is obviouslyimpossible, and must be checked by some means.' Aut Malthus autDiabolus. And surely here, if anywhere at all, we tremble on the veryverge of natural selection.

It would be impossible to follow young Darwin in detail through hisjourney to Buenos Ayres, and up the Parana to Santa Fé, which occupiedthe autumn of 1833. In the succeeding year he visited Patagonia and theFalkland Islands, having previously made his first acquaintance withsavage life among the naked Fuegians of the extreme southern point ofthe continent. Some of these interesting natives, taken to England by[Pg 52]Captain Fitzroy on a former visit, had accompanied the 'Beagle' throughall her wanderings, and from them Darwin obtained that close insightinto the workings of savage human nature which he afterwards utilisedwith such conspicuous ability in the 'Descent of Man.' ThroughMagellan's Straits the party made their way up the coasts of Chili, andDarwin had there an opportunity of investigating the geology and biologyof the Cordillera. The year 1835 was chiefly spent in that temperatecountry and in tropical Peru; and as the autumn went on, the 'Beagle'made her way across a belt of the Pacific to the Galapagos archipelago.

Small and unimportant as are those little equatorial islands from thegeographical and commercial point of view, they will yet remain for everclassic ground to the biologists of the future from their closeconnection with the master-problems of the 'Origin of Species.' Heremore, perhaps, than anywhere else the naturalist of the 'Beagle' foundhimself face to face in real earnest with the ultimate questions ofcreation or evolution. A group of tiny volcanic islets, never joined toany land, nor even united to one another, yet each possessing its ownspecial zoological features—the Galapagos roused to an extraordinarydegree the irresistible questionings of Darwin's mind. They contain nofrogs, and no mammal save a mouse, brought to them, no doubt, by somepassing ship. The only insects are beetles, which possess peculiarfacilities for being transported in the egg or grub across salt waterupon floating logs. There are two kinds of snake, one tortoise, and fourlizards; but, in striking contrast to this extreme poverty ofterrestrial forms, there are at least fifty-five distinct[Pg 53] species ofnative birds. A few snails complete the list. Now most of these animals,though closely resembling the fauna of Ecuador, the nearest mainland,are specifically distinct; they have varied (as we now know) from theircontinental types owing to natural selection under the new circumstancesin which they have been placed. But Darwin had not yet evolved thatpotent key to the great riddle of organic existence. He saw the problem,but not its solution. 'Most of the organic productions,' he saysplainly, 'are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even adifference between the inhabitants of the different islands: yet allshow a marked relationship with those of America, though separated fromthat continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles inwidth.... Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the moreastonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at theirconfined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and theboundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led tobelieve that within a period geologically recent the unbroken sea washere spread out. Hence, both in space and time we seem to be broughtsomewhat nearer to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the firstappearance of new beings on this earth.' Among the most singular ofthese zoological facts may be mentioned the existence in the Galapagosarchipelago of a genus of gigantic and ugly lizard, the amblyrhyncus,unknown elsewhere, but here assuming the forms of two species, the onemarine and the other terrestrial. In minuter points, the differences offauna and flora between the various islands are simply astounding, so asto compel the idea that[Pg 54] each form must necessarily have been developednot merely for the group, but for the special island which it actuallyinhabits. No wonder that Darwin should say in conclusion, 'One isastonished at the amount of creative force, if such an expression may beused, displayed on these small, barren, and rocky islands; and stillmore so at its diverse, yet analogous, action on points so near eachother.' Here again, in real earnest, the young observer trembles visiblyon the very verge of natural selection. In the 'Origin of Species' hemakes full use, more than once, of the remarkable facts he observed withso much interest in these tiny isolated oceanic specks of the Americangalaxy.

From the Galapagos the 'Beagle' steered a straight course for Tahiti,and Darwin then beheld with his own eyes the exquisite beauty of thePolynesian Islands. Thence they sailed for New Zealand, the most trulyinsular large mass of land in the whole world, supplied accordingly witha fauna and flora of most surprising meagreness and poverty of species.In the woods, our observer noted very few birds, and he remarks withastonishment that so big an island—as large as Great Britain—shouldnot possess a single living indigenous mammal, save a solitary rat ofdoubtful origin. Australia and Tasmania, with their antiquated andstranded marsupial inhabitants, almost completed the round trip. KeelingIsland next afforded a basis for the future famous observations uponcoral reefs; and thence by Mauritius, St. Helena, Ascension, Bahia,Pernambuco, and the beautiful Azores, the 'Beagle' made her way home byslow stages to England, which she reached in safety on October the 2nd,1836. What an ideal education[Pg 55] for the future reconstructor ofbiological science! He had now all his problems cut and dried, ready tohis hand, and he had nothing important left to do—except to sit downquietly in his study, and proceed to solve them. Observation andcollection had given him one half the subject-matter of the 'Origin ofSpecies;' reflection and Malthus were to give him the other half. Neverhad great mind a nobler chance; never, again, had noble chance a greatmind better adapted by nature and heredity to make the most of it. Theman was not wanting to the opportunity, nor was the opportunity wantingto the man. Organism and environment fell together into perfect harmony;and so, by a lucky combination of circumstances, the secret of the ageswas finally wrung from not unwilling nature by the far-seeing andindustrious volunteer naturalist of the 'Beagle' expedition.

It would be giving a very false idea of the interests which stirredCharles Darwin's mind during his long five years' voyage, however, if wewere to dwell exclusively upon the biological side of his numerousobservations on that memorable cruise. Ethnology, geology, oceanicphenomena, the height of the snow-line, the climate of the Antarcticislands, the formation of icebergs, the transport of boulders, thehabits and manners engendered by slavery, all almost equally aroused intheir own way the young naturalist's vivid interest. Nowhere do we getthe faintest trace of narrow specialism; nowhere are we cramped withinthe restricted horizon of the mere vulgar beetle-hunter andbutterfly-catcher. The biologist of the 'Beagle' had taken the wholeworld of science for his special[Pg 56] province. Darwin's mind with all itsvastness was not, indeed, profoundly analytical. The task of working outthe psychological and metaphysical aspects of evolution fell rather tothe great organising and systematising intellect of Herbert Spencer. Butwithin the realm of material fact, and of the widest possible inferencesbased upon such fact, Darwin's keen and comprehensive spirit rangedfreely over the whole illimitable field of nature. 'No one,' says Bucklewith unwonted felicity, 'can have a firm grasp of any science if, byconfining himself to it, he shuts out the light of analogy. He may, nodoubt, work at the details of his subject; he may be useful in adding toits facts; he will never be able to enlarge its philosophy. For thephilosophy of every department depends on its connection with otherdepartments, and must therefore be sought at their points of contact. Itmust be looked for in the place where they touch and coalesce: it lies,not in the centre of each science, but on the confines and margin.' Thisprofound truth Darwin fully and instinctively realised. It was theall-embracing catholicity of his manifold interests that raised him intothe greatest pure biologist of all time, and that enabled him toco-ordinate with such splendid results the raw data of so many distinctand separate sciences. And even as early as the days of the cruise inthe 'Beagle,' that innate catholicity had already asserted itself infull vigour. Now it is a party of Gauchos throwing the bola that engagesfor the moment his eager attention; and now again it is a group ofshivering Fuegians, standing naked with their long hair streaming in thewind on a snowy promontory of their barren coast.[Pg 57] Here he examines thetubular lightning-holes melted in the solid rock of Maldonado by theelectric energy; and there he observes the moving boulder-streams thatcourse like torrents down the rugged corries of the Falkland Islands. Atone time he works upon the unstudied geology of the South AmericanPampas; at another, he inspects the now classical lagoon and narrowfringing reef of the Keeling archipelago. Everywhere he sees whatever ofmost noteworthy in animate or inanimate nature is there to be seen; andeverywhere he draws from it innumerable lessons, to be applied hereafterto the special field of study upon which his intense and active energieswere finally concentrated. It is not too much to say, indeed, that itwas the voyage of the 'Beagle' which gave us in the last resort the'Origin of Species' and its great fellow the 'Descent of Man.'

[1] The full narrative was first given to the world in 1839,some three years after Darwin's return to England, so that much of itevidently represents the results of his maturer thinking and reading onthe facts collected during his journey round the world.[Pg 58]

CHAPTER V.

THE PERIOD OF INCUBATION.

When Charles Darwin landed in England on his return from the voyage ofthe 'Beagle' he was nearly twenty-eight. When he published the firstedition of the 'Origin of Species' he was over fifty. The intermediateyears, though much occupied by many minor works of deep specialistscientific importance, were still mainly devoted to collecting materialfor the one crowning effort of his life, the chief monument of his greatco-ordinating and commanding intellect—the settlement of the questionof organic evolution.

'There is one thing,' says Professor Fiske, 'which a man of originalscientific or philosophical genius in a rightly ordered world shouldnever be called upon to do. He should never be called upon to earn aliving; for that is a wretched waste of energy, in which the highestintellectual power is sure to suffer serious detriment, and runs therisk of being frittered away into hopeless ruin.' From this unhappynecessity Charles Darwin, like his predecessor Lyell, was luckily free.He settled down early in a home of his own, and worked away at his ownoccupations, with no sordid need for earning the day's bread, but with[Pg 59]perfect leisure to carry out the great destiny for which the chances ofthe universe had singled him out. His subsequent history is the historyof his wonderful and unique contributions to natural science.

The first thing to be done, of course, was the arrangement andclassification of the natural history spoils gathered during the cruise,and the preparation of his own journal of the voyage for publication.The strict scientific results of the trip were described in the 'Zoologyof the Voyage of the "Beagle,"' the different parts of which wereundertaken by rising men of science of the highest distinction, underCharles Darwin's own editorship. Sir Richard Owen took in hand thefossil mammals; Waterhouse arranged their living allies; Gould discussedthe birds, Jenyns the fish, and Bell the amphibians and reptiles. Inthis vast co-operative publication Darwin thus obtained the assistanceof many among the most competent specialists in the England of his day,and learned to understand his own collections by the light thrown uponthem from the focussed lamps of the most minute technical learning. Asfor the journal, it was originally published with the general account ofthe cruise by Captain Fitzroy in 1839, but was afterwards set forth in aseparate form under the title of 'A Naturalist's Voyage Round theWorld.'

But while Darwin was thus engaged in arranging and classifying theanimals and plants he had brought home with him, the germs of thoseinquiring ideas about the origin of species which we have alreadyobserved in his account of the voyage were quickening into fresh lifewithin him. As he ruminated at his leisure over[Pg 60] the results of hisaccumulations, he was beginning to work upon the great problem with thedefinite and conscious resolution of solving it. 'On my return home, itoccurred to me,' he says, 'in 1837, that something might perhaps be madeout on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on allsorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After fiveyears' work, I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew upsome short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of theconclusions that then seemed to me probable; from that period to thepresent day [1859] I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope thatI may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give themto show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.'

So Darwin wrote at fifty. The words are weighty and well worthy ofconsideration. They give us in a nutshell the true secret of Darwin'ssuccess in compelling the attention and assent of his contemporaries tohis completed theory. For speculations and hypotheses like those ofLamarck and Erasmus Darwin, however brilliant and luminous they may be,the hard, dry, scientific mind cares as a rule less than nothing. Men ofgenius and insight like Goethe and Oken may, indeed, seize greedily uponthe pregnant suggestion; their intellects are already attuned by natureto its due reception and assimilation; but the mere butterfly-catchersand plant-hunters of the world, with whom after all rests ultimately thepractical acceptance or rejection of such a theory, can only beconvinced by long and patient accumulations of facts, by infiniteinstances and endless examples, by exhaustive surveys[Pg 61] of the wholefield of nature in a thousand petty details piecemeal. They have to bedriven by repeated beating into the right path. Everywhere they fancythey see the loophole of an objection, which must be carefully closedbeforehand against them with anticipatory argument, as we close hedgesby the wayside against the obtrusive donkey with a cautious bunch ofthorny brambles. Even if Charles Darwin had hit upon the fundamentalidea of natural selection, and had published it, as Wallace did, in theform of a mere splendidaperçu, he would never have revolutionised theworld of biology. When the great discovery was actually promulgated, itwas easy enough to win the assent of philosophical thinkers like HerbertSpencer; easy enough, even, to gain the ready adhesion of non-biologicalbut kindred minds, like Leslie Stephen's and John Morley's; those mightall, perhaps, have been readily convinced by far less heavy and crushingartillery than that so triumphantly marshalled together in the 'Originof Species.' But in order to command the slow and grudging adhesion ofthe rank and file of scientific workers, the 'hodmen of science,' asProfessor Huxley calls them, it was needful to bring together animposing array of closely serried facts, to secure every post in therear before taking a single step onward, and to bring to bear upon everyantagonist the exact form of argument with which he was alreadythoroughly familiar. It was by carefully pursuing these safe andcautious philosophical tactics that Charles Darwin gained his greatvictory. Where others were pregnant, he was cogent. He met theDryasdusts of science on their own ground, and he put them fairly toflight with their own weapons.[Pg 62] More than that, he brought them all overin the long run as deserters into his own camp, and converted them fromdoubtful and suspicious foes into warm adherents of the evolutionarybanner.

Moreover, fortunately for the world, Darwin's own mind was essentiallyone of the inductive type. If a great deductive thinker and speculatorlike Herbert Spencer had hit upon the self-same idea of survival of thefittest, he might have communicated it to a small following of receptivedisciples, who would have understood it and accepted it, ona priorigrounds alone, and gradually passed it on to the grades beneath them;but he would never have touched the slow and cautious elephantineintellect of the masses. The common run of mankind are not deductive;they require to have everything made quite clear to them by example andinstance. The English intelligence in particular shows itself as a rulecongenitally incapable of appreciating the superior logical certitude ofthe deductive method. Englishmen will not even believe that the squareon the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the containing sides untilthey have measured and weighed as well as they are able by rudeexperimental devices a few selected pieces of rudely shaped rectangularpaper. It was a great gain, therefore, that the task of reconstructingthe course of organic evolution should fall to the lot of a highlytrained and masterly intelligence of the inductive order. Darwin hadfirst to convince himself, and then he could proceed to convince theworld. He set about the task with characteristic patience andthoroughness. No man that ever lived possessed in a more remarkabledegree than he did the innate capacity[Pg 63] for taking trouble. For fiveyears, as a mere preliminary, he accumulated facts in immense variety,and then for the first time and in the vaguest possible way he—'allowedhimself to speculate.' That brings us down to the year 1842, when thefirst notes of the 'Origin of Species' must have been tentativelycommitted to paper. It was in 1859 that the first edition of thecomplete work was given to the world. Compare this with the case ofNewton, who similarly kept his grand idea of gravitation for many yearsin embryo, until more exact measurements of the moon's mass and distanceshould enable him to verify it to his own satisfaction.

One other item of immense importance in the genesis of the fullDarwinian doctrine deserves mention here—I mean, the exact moment oftime occupied by Charles Darwin in the continuous history of scientificthought. A generation or two earlier, in Erasmus Darwin's days, biologyhad not yet arrived at the true classification of animals and plantsupon an essentially hereditary basis. The Linnæan arrangement, thenuniversally accepted, was wholly artificial in its main features; itdistributed species without regard to their fundamental likenesses ofstructure and organisation. But the natural system of Jussieu and DeCandolle, by arranging plants into truly related groups, made possiblethe proofs of an order of affiliation in the vegetable kingdom; whileCuvier's similar reconstruction of the animal world gave a like footholdto the evolutionary philosopher in the other great department of organicnature. The recognition of kinship between the various members of thesame family necessarily preceded the establishment[Pg 64] of a regulargenealogical theory of life in its entirety.

Though we are here concerned mainly with Charles Darwin the thinker andwriter—not with Charles Darwin the husband and father—a few words ofexplanation as to his private life must necessarily be added at thepresent point, before we pass on to consider the long, slow, andcautious brewing of that wonderful work, the 'Origin of Species,' Darwinreturned home from the voyage of the 'Beagle' at the end of the year1836. Soon after, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, no doubtthrough the influence of his friend Lyell, who was quite enthusiasticover his splendid geological investigations on the rate of elevation inthe Pampas and the Cordillera. Acting on Lyell's advice, too, hedetermined to seek no official appointment, but to devote himselfentirely for the rest of his life to the pursuit of science. In 1838, atthe age of twenty-nine, he read before the Geological Society his paperon the 'Connection of Volcanic Phenomena with the Elevation of MountainChains,' when, says Lyell admiringly in a private letter, 'he openedupon De la Beche, Phillips, and others'—the veterans of thescience—'his whole battery of the earthquakes and volcanoes of theAndes.' Shortly after, the audacious young man was appointed secretaryto the Geological Society, a post which he filled when the voyage of the'Beagle' was first published in 1839.

In the early part of that same year, the rising naturalist took tohimself a wife from one of the houses to which he himself owed no smallpart of his conspicuous greatness. His choice fell upon his cousin,[Pg 65]Miss Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, of Maer Hall; and,after three years of married life in London, he settled at last at DownHouse, near Orpington, in Kent, where for the rest of his days he passedhis time among his conservatories and his pigeons, his garden and hisfowls, with his children growing up quietly beside him, and the greatthinking world of London within easy reach of a few minutes' journey.His private means enabled him to live the pleasant life of an Englishcountry gentleman, and devote himself unremittingly to the pursuit ofscience. Ill health, indeed, interfered sadly with his powers of work;but system and patience did wonders during his working days, which wereregularly parcelled out between study and recreation, and utilised andeconomised in the very highest possible degree. Early to bed and earlyto rise, wandering unseen among the lanes and paths, or riding slowly onhis favourite black cob, the great naturalist passed forty years happilyand usefully at Down, where all the village knew and loved him. A man ofsingular simplicity and largeness of heart, Charles Darwin never reallylearnt to know his own greatness. And that charming innocence andignorance of his real value made the value itself all the greater. Hismoral qualities, indeed, were no less admirable and unique in their waythan his intellectual faculties. To that charming candour and delightfulunostentatiousness which everybody must have noticed in his publishedwritings, he united in private life a kindliness of disposition, a widthof sympathy, and a ready generosity which made him as much beloved byhis friends as he was admired and respected by all Europe. The very[Pg 66]servants who came beneath his roof stopped there for the most partduring their whole lifetime. In his earlier years at Down, the quietKentish home was constantly enlivened by the visits of men like Lyell,Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and Wollaston. During his later days, it wasthe Mecca of a world-wide scientific and philosophic pilgrimage, whereall the greatest men our age has produced sought at times the rarehonour of sitting before the face of the immortal master. But to thevery last Darwin himself never seemed to discover that he was anythingmore than just an average man of science among his natural peers.

Shortly after Darwin went to Down he began one long and memorableexperiment, which in itself casts a flood of light upon his patient andpainstaking method of inquiry. Two years before, he had read at theGeological Society a paper on the 'Formation of Mould,' which more thanthirty years later he expanded into his famous treatise on the 'Actionof Earthworms.' His uncle and father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, suggestedto him that the apparent sinking of stones on the surface might reallybe due to earthworm castings. So, as soon as he had some land of his ownto experiment upon, he began, in 1842, to spread broken chalk over afield at Down, in which, twenty-nine years later, in 1871, a trench wasdug to test the results. What other naturalist ever waited so long andso patiently to discover the upshot of a single experiment? Is itwonderful that a man who worked like that should succeed, not by faithbut by logical power, in removing mountains?

Unfortunately, we do not know the exact date when Darwin first readMalthus. But that the perusal of[Pg 67] that remarkable book formed a crisisand turning-point in his mental development we know from his owndistinct statement in a letter to Haeckel, prefixed to the brilliantGerman evolutionist's 'History of Creation.' 'It seemed to me probable,'says Darwin, speaking of his own early development, 'that allied specieswere descended from a common ancestor. But during several years I couldnot conceive how each form could have been modified so as to becomeadmirably adapted to its place in nature. I began therefore to studydomesticated animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceivedthat man's power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals wasthe most powerful of all means in the production of new races. Havingattended to the habits of animals and their relations to the surroundingconditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle for existence towhich all organisms are subjected; and my geological observations hadallowed me to appreciate to a certain extent the duration of pastgeological periods. With my mind thus prepared I fortunately happened toread Malthus's "Essay on Population" and the idea of natural selectionthrough the struggle for existence at once occurred to me. Of all thesubordinate points in the theory, the last which I understood was thecause of the tendency in the descendants from a common progenitor todiverge in character.'

It is impossible, indeed, to overrate the importance of Malthus, viewedas a schoolmaster to bring men to Darwin, and to bring Darwin himself tothe truth. Without the 'Essay on the Principle of Population' it isquite conceivable that we should never have had the 'Origin of Species'or the 'Descent of Man.'[Pg 68]

At the same time, Darwin had not been idle in other departments ofscientific work. Side by side with his collections for his final efforthe had been busy on his valuable treatise upon Coral Reefs, in which heproved, mainly from his own observations on the Keeling archipelago,that atolls owe their origin to a subsidence of the supportingocean-floor, the rate of upward growth of the reefs keeping pace on thewhole with the gradual depression of the sea-bottom. 'No more admirableexample of scientific method,' says Professor Geikie forty years later,'was ever given to the world; and even if he had written nothing else,this treatise alone would have placed Darwin in the very front ofinvestigators of nature.' But, from our present psychological andhistorical point of view, as a moment in the development of Darwin'sinfluence, and therefore of the evolutionary impulse in general, itpossesses a still greater and more profound importance, because the workin which the theory is unfolded forms a perfect masterpiece of thoroughand comprehensive inductive method, and gained for its author awell-deserved reputation as a sound and sober scientific inquirer. Theacquisition of such a reputation, afterwards increased by thepublication of the monograph on the Family Cirripedia (in 1851), provedof immense use to Charles Darwin in the fierce battle which was to ragearound the unconscious body of the 'Origin of Species.' To be 'sound' iseverywhere of incalculable value; to have approved oneself to the slowand cautious intelligence of the Philistine classes is a mighty spearand shield for a strong man; but in England, and above all in scientificEngland, it is absolutely indispensable to the thinker who would[Pg 69]accomplish any great revolution. Soundness is to the world of sciencewhat respectability is to the world of business—thesine qua non forsuccessfully gaining even a hearing from established personages.

To read the book on Coral Reefs is indeed to take a lesson of thedeepest value in applied inductive canons. Every fact is dulymarshalled: every conclusion is drawn by the truest and most legitimateprocess from careful observation or crucial experiment. Bit by bit,Darwin shows most admirably that, through gradual submergence, fringingreefs are developed into barrier-reefs, and these again into atolls orlagoon islands; and incidentally he throws a vivid light on the slowsecular movements upward or downward for ever taking place in theworld's crust. But the value of the work as a geological record, greatas it is, is as nothing compared with its value as a training exercisein inductive logic. Darwin was now learning by experience how to use hisown immense powers.

Meanwhile, the environment too had been gradually moving. In 1832, theyear after young Darwin set out upon his cruise, Lyell published thefirst edition of his 'Principles of Geology,' establishing once for allthe uniformitarian concept of that branch of science. In 1836, the yearwhen he returned, Rafinesque, in his 'New Flora of North America,' hadaccepted within certain cramping limits the idea that 'all species mightonce have been varieties, and that many varieties are gradually becomingspecies by assuming constant and peculiar characters.' Haldeman inBoston, and Grant at University College, London, were teaching fromtheir professorial chairs the self-same novel and revolutionary[Pg 70]doctrine. At last, in 1844, Robert Chambers published anonymously hisfamous and much-debated 'Vestiges of Creation,' which brought down thequestion of evolutionversus creation from the senate ofsavants tothe arena of the mere general public, and set up at once a universalfever of inquiry into the mysterious question of the origin of species.Chambers himself was a man rather of general knowledge and some nativephilosophical insight than of any marked scientific accuracy or depth.His work in its original form displayed comparatively littleacquaintance with the vast groundwork of the question atissue—zoological, botanical, geological, and so forth—and in CharlesDarwin's own opinion showed 'a great want of scientific caution.' Butits graphic style, its vivid picturesqueness, and to the world at largethe startling novelty of its brilliant and piquant suggestions, made itburst at once into an unwonted popularity for a work of so distinctlyphilosophical a character. In nine years it leaped rapidly through noless than ten successive editions, and remained until the publication ofthe 'Origin of Species' the chief authoritative exponent in England ofthe still struggling evolutionary principle.

The 'Vestiges of Creation' may be succinctly described as Lamarck andwater, the watery element being due in part to the unnecessary obtrusion(more Scotico) of a metaphysical and theological principle into thephysical universe. Chambers himself, in his latest edition (before thebook was finally killed by the advent of Darwinism), thus brieflydescribes his main concepts: 'The several series of animated beings,from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are,under[Pg 71] the providence of God, the results,first, of an impulse whichhas been imparted to the forms of life, advancing them, in definitetimes, by generation, through grades of organisation, terminating in thehighest dicotyledons and vertebrata, these grades being few in number,and generally marked by intervals of organic character, which we find tobe a practical difficulty in ascertaining affinities;second, ofanother impulse connected with the vital forces, tending, in the courseof generations, to modify organic structures in accordance with externalcircumstances, as food, the nature of the habitat, and the meteoricagencies.' Now it is clear at once that these two supposed 'impulses'are really quite miraculous in their essence. They do not help us at allto a distinct physical and realisable conception of any natural agencywhereby species became differentiated one from the other. They lay thewhole burden of species-making upon a single primordial supernaturalimpetus, imparted to the first living germ by the will of the Creator,and acting ever since continuously it is true, but none the lessmiraculously for all that. For many creations Chambers substitutes onesingle long creative nisus: where Darwin saw natural selection, hisScotch predecessor saw adeus ex machina, helping on the course oforganic development by a constant but unseen interference from above. Hesupposed evolution to be predetermined by some intrinsic and externallyimplanted proclivity. In short, Chambers's theory is Lamarck'stheologised, and spoilt in the process.

The book had nevertheless a most prodigious and perfectly unprecedentedsuccess. The secret of its authorship was keenly debated and jealouslykept. The[Pg 72] most ridiculous surmises as to its anonymous origin wereeverywhere afloat. Some attributed it to Thackeray, and some to PrinceAlbert, some to Lyell, some to Sir John Herschel, and some to CharlesDarwin himself. Obscurantists thought it a wicked book; 'intellectual'people thought it an advanced book. As a matter of fact it was neitherthe one nor the other. It was just a pale and colourless transcript ofthe old familiar teleological Lamarckism. Yet it did good in itsgeneration. The public at large were induced by its ephemeral vogue tointerest themselves in a question to which they had never previouslygiven even a passing thought, though more practised biologists ofevolutionary tendencies were grieved at heart that evolution shouldfirst have been popularly presented to the English world under sounscientific, garbled, and mutilated a form. From the philosophic side,Herbert Spencer found 'this ascription of organic evolution to someaptitude naturally possessed by organisms or miraculously imposed uponthem' to be 'one of those explanations which explain nothing—a shapingof ignorance into the semblance of knowledge. The cause assigned,' hesays, 'is not a true cause—not a cause assimilable to known causes—nota cause that can be anywhere shown to produce analogous effects. It is acause unrepresentable in thought: one of those illegitimate symbolicconceptions which cannot by any mental process be elaborated into a realconception.' From the scientific side, on the other hand, Darwin feltsadly the inaccuracy and want of profound technical knowledge everywheredisplayed by the anonymous author. These things might naturally causethe enemy to blaspheme.[Pg 73] No worse calamity, indeed, can happen to agreat truth than for its defence to be intrusted to inefficient hands.Nevertheless, long after, in the 'Origin of Species,' the greatnaturalist wrote with generous appreciation of the 'Vestiges ofCreation,' 'In my own opinion it has done excellent service in thiscountry in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, andin thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.'

Still Darwin gave no sign. A flaccid, cartilaginous, unphilosophicevolutionism had full possession of the field for the moment, andclaimed, as it were, to be the genuine representative of the young andvigorous biological creed, while he himself was in truth the real heirto all the honours of the situation. He was in possession of themaster-key which alone could unlock the bars that opposed the progressof evolution, and still he waited. He could afford to wait. He wasdiligently collecting, amassing, investigating; eagerly reading everynew systematic work, every book of travels, every scientific journal,every record of sport, or exploration, or discovery, to extract from thedead mass of undigested fact whatever item of implicit value might swellthe definite co-ordinated series of notes in his own commonplace booksfor the now distinctly contemplated 'Origin of Species.' His way was tomake all sure behind him, to summon up all his facts in irresistiblearray, and never to set out upon a public progress until he was secureagainst all possible attacks of the ever-watchful and alert enemy in therear. Few men would have had strength of mind enough to resist thetemptation offered by the publication of the 'Vestiges of Creation,' andthe extraordinary success attained by so flabby a[Pg 74] presentation of theevolutionary case: Darwin resisted it, and he did wisely.

We may, however, take it for granted, I doubt not, that it was theappearance and success of Chambers's invertebrate book which inducedDarwin, in 1844 (the year of its publication), to enlarge his shortnotes 'into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed to himprobable.' This sketch he showed to Dr. (now Sir Joseph) Hooker, nodoubt as a precaution to ensure his own claim of priority against anyfuture possible competitor. And having thus eased his mind for themoment, he continued to observe, to read, to devour 'Transactions,' tocollate instances, with indefatigable persistence for fifteen yearslonger. If any man mentally measures out fifteen years of his own life,and bethinks him of how long a space it seems when thus deliberatelypictured, he will be able to realise a little more definitely—but onlya little—how profound was the patience, the self-denial, thesingle-mindedness of Darwin's intense search after the ultimate truthsof natural science.

What was the sketch that he thus committed to paper in 1844, andsubmitted to the judgment of his friend Hooker? It was the germ of thetheory of natural selection. According to that theory, organicdevelopment is due to the survival of the fittest among innumerablevariations, good, bad, and indifferent, from one or more parent stocks.Darwin's reading of Malthus had suggested to him (apparently as early asthe date of publication of the 'Naturalist's Journal') the idea thatevery species of plant and animal must always be producing a far greaternumber of seeds, eggs, germs, or young offspring than could possibly beneeded for[Pg 75] the maintenance of the average number of the species. Ofthese young, by far the greater number must always perish fromgeneration to generation, for want of space, of food, of air, of rawmaterial. The survivors in each brood must be those naturally bestadapted for survival. The many would be eaten, starved, overrun, orcrowded out; the few that survive would be those that possessed anyspecial means of defence against aggressors, any special advantage forescaping starvation, any special protection against overrunning orovercrowding foes. Animals and plants, Darwin found on inquiry andinvestigation, tended to vary under diverse circumstances from theparent or parents that originally produced them. These variations wereusually infinitesimal in amount, but sometimes more considerable or evenstriking. If any particular variation tended in any way to preserve thelife of the creatures that exhibited it, beyond the average of theirlike competitors, that variation would in the long run survive, and theindividuals that possessed it, being thus favoured in the struggle forexistence, would replace the less adapted form from which they sprang.Darwinism is Malthusianism on the large scale: it is the application ofthe calculus of population to the wide facts of universal life.

In one sense, indeed, it may be said that, given Malthus on the one handand the Lamarckian evolutionism on the other, some great man somewheremust sooner or later, almost of necessity, have combined the two, andhit out the doctrine of natural selection as we actually know it. Quiteso; but then the point is just this: Darwinwas the great man inquestion; hedid the work which in the very essence of things some[Pg 76]such great man was naturally and inevitably predestined to do. You canalways easily manage to get on without any particular great man,provided, of course, you have ready to hand another equally able greatman by whom to replace him in the scheme of existence. But how manyordinary naturalists possess the width of mind and universality ofinterest which would prompt them to read, mark, learn, and inwardlydigest a politico-economical treatise of the calibre of Malthus? Howmany, having done so, have the keenness of vision to perceive theensuing biological implications? How many, having seen them, have theskill and the patience to work up the infinite chaos of botanical andzoological detail into the far-reaching generalisations of the 'Originof Species'? Merely to have caught at the grand idea is in itself nosmall achievement; others did so and deserve all honour for theirinsight; but to flesh it out with all the minute care and conclusiveforce of Darwin's masterpiece is a thousand times a greater and noblermonument of human endeavour.

During the fifteen years from 1844 to 1859, however, Darwin's pen was byno means idle. In the first-named year he published his 'GeologicalObservations on Volcanic Islands'—part of the 'Beagle' explorationseries; in 1846 he followed this up by his 'Geological Observations onSouth America;' in 1851 he gave to the world his monograph on 'RecentBarnacles;' and in 1853, his treatise on the fossil species of the samefamily. But all these works of restricted interest remained alwayssubsidiary to the one great central task of his entire lifetime, thepreparation of his projected volume on the Origin of Species.[Pg 77]

All through the middle decades of the century Darwin continued to labourat his vast accumulation of illustrative facts; and side by side withhis continuous toil, outside opinion kept paving the way for the finalacceptance of his lucid ideas. The public was buying and reading all thetime its ten editions of the 'Vestiges of Creation.' It was slowlydigesting Lyell's 'Principles of Geology,' in which the old cataclysmictheories were featly demolished, and the uniformitarian conception of apast gradually and insensibly merging into the present was conclusivelyestablished. It was getting accustomed to statements like those of theyounger St. Hilaire, in 1850, that specific characters may be modifiedby changes in the environing conditions, and that the modifications thusproduced may often be of generic value—may make a difference so greatthat we must regard the product not merely as belonging to a distinctspecies, but even to a distinct genus or higher kind. In 1852 HerbertSpencer published in the 'Leader' his remarkable essay, contrasting thetheories of creation and evolution, as applied to organic beings, withall the biting force of his profound intelligence; and in 1855, the sameencyclopædic philosopher put forth the first rough sketch of his'Principles of Psychology,' in which he took the lead in treating thephenomena of mind from the point of view of gradual development. In thatextraordinary work, the philosopher of evolution traced the origin ofall mental powers and faculties by slow gradations from the verysimplest subjective elements. The 'Principles of Psychology' precededthe 'Origin of Species' by nearly five years; the first collected volumeof Mr. Spencer's[Pg 78] essays preceded Darwin's work by some twelve months.Baden-Powell's essay on the 'Philosophy of Creation' (much debated andcondemned in ecclesiastical circles), and Professor Owen's somewhatcontradictory utterances on the nature of types and archetypal ideas,also helped to keep alive interest in the problem of origins up to thevery moment of the final appearance of Darwin's great and splendidsolution.

It is interesting during these intermediate years to watch from time totime the occasional side-hints of Darwin's activity and of the interestit aroused among his scientific contemporaries. In 1854, for example,Sir Charles Lyell notes, after an evening at Darwin's, how Sir JosephHooker astonished him with an account of that strange orchid, Catasetum,which bears three totally distinct kinds of flowers on the same plant;'It will figure,' he says, 'in C. Darwin's book on species, with manyother "ugly facts," as Hooker, clinging like me to the orthodox faith,calls these and other abnormal vagaries.' On a similar occasion, alittle later, Lyell asks, after meeting 'Huxley, Hooker, and Wollastonat Darwin's,' 'After all, did we not come from an ourang?' Last of all,in 1857, Darwin himself writes an anticipatory letter to his Americanfriend, Asa Gray, in which he mentions 'six points'—the cardinalconceptions of the 'Origin of Species.' His book is now fairly underweigh; he speaks of it himself to acquaintance and correspondents as anacknowledged project.

Events were growing ripe for the birth. A lucky accident precipitatedits parturition in the course of the year 1858.[Pg 79]

CHAPTER VI.

'THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.'

Alfred Russel Wallace, a young Welsh biologist, went out at twenty-four,in 1848, to the Amazons River, in company with Bates (the author of 'TheNaturalist on the Amazons'), to collect birds and butterflies, and tostudy tropical life in the richest region of equatorial America. Likeall other higher zoologists of their time, the two young explorers weredeeply interested in the profound questions of origin and metamorphosis,and of geographical distribution, and in the letters that passed betweenthem before they started they avowed to one another that the object oftheir quest was a solution of the pressing biological enigma of creationor evolution. Starting with fresh hopes and a few pounds in pocket, onan old, worn-out, and unseaworthy slave-trader, they often discussedthese deep problems of life and nature together upon the Sargasso sea,or among the palms and lianas of the Brazilian woodlands. The air wasthick with whiffs and foretastes of evolutionism, and the two buddingnaturalists of the Amazons expedition had inhaled them eagerly withevery breath. They saw among the mimicking organisms of that[Pg 80] equatorialzone strange puzzles to engage their deepest attention; they recognisedin the veins and spots that diversified the filmy membranes of insects'wings the hieroglyphs of nature, writing as on a tablet for them todecipher the story of the slow modification of species. In 1852—theyear when Herbert Spencer in England published his essay on the'Development Hypothesis,' and when Naudin in France put forth his boldand able paper on the 'Origin of Species'—Wallace once more returned toEurope, and gave to the world his interesting 'Travels on the Amazonsand the Rio Negro.' Two years later the indefatigable traveller set outa second time on a voyage of tropical exploration, among the islands ofthe Malay archipelago, and for eight years he wandered about in Malayhuts and remote islets, gathering in solitude and isolation the enormousstore of minute facts which he afterwards lavished with so prodigal ahand upon 'Tropical Nature,' and the 'Geographical Distribution ofAnimals.'

While Wallace was still at Amboyna, he sent home in 1858 a strikingmemoir, addressed to Darwin, with a request that he would forward it toSir Charles Lyell, for presentation to the Linnean Society. Darwinopened and read his brother naturalist's paper, and found to hissurprise that it contained his own theory of natural selection, notworked out in detail, as he himself was working it out, but stillcomplete in spirit and essence, with no important portion of the centralidea lacking to its full rotundity of conception. A jealous man wouldhave thrown obstacles in the way of publication; but both Darwin andWallace were born superior to the meannesses of jealousy. The eldernaturalist commended[Pg 81] his young rival's paper at once to Sir CharlesLyell, who sent it on immediately to the Linnean Society.

But Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, both of whom knew ofDarwin's work, thought it advisable that he should publish, in the'Journal' of the Society, a few extracts from his own manuscripts, sideby side with Wallace's paper. Darwin, therefore, selected some essentialpassages for the purpose from his own long-gathered and voluminousnotes, and the two contributions were read together before the Societyon July the 1st, 1858. That double communication marks the date of birthof modern evolutionism. It is to the eternal credit of both thinkersthat each accepted his own true position with regard to the greatdiscovery in perfect sincerity. The elder naturalist never strove for amoment to press his own claim to priority against the younger: theyounger, with singular generosity and courtesy, waived his own claim todivide the honours of discovery in favour of the elder. Not one wordsave words of fraternal admiration and cordial appreciation ever passedthe lips of either with regard to the other.

The distinctive notion of natural selection, indeed, like all true andfruitful ideas, had more than once flashed for a moment across thepenetrating mind of more than one independent investigator. As early as1813, Dr. Wells, the famous author of the theory of dew, applied thatparticular conception to the single case of the production of specialraces among mankind.

'Of the accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the firstfew and scattered inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa,' hewrote, 'some one would be better fitted than the others to bear thediseases of[Pg 82] the country. This race would consequently multiply, whilethe others would decrease; not only from their inability to sustain theattacks of disease, but from their incapacity of contending with theirmore vigorous neighbours.... The same disposition to form varietiesstill existing, a darker and a darker race would in the course of timeoccur; and as the darkest would be the best fitted for the climate, thiswould at last become the most prevalent, if not the only race in thecountry.' Here we have not merely the radical concept of naturalselection, but also the subordinate idea of its exertion upon whatDarwin calls 'spontaneous variations.' What is wanting in the paper isthe application of the faintly descried law to the facts andcircumstances of general biology: Wells saw only a particular instance,where Darwin and Wallace more vividly perceived a universal principle.Again, in 1831, Mr. Patrick Matthew in that singular appendix to hisbook on naval timber actually enunciates the same idea, applied thistime to the whole of nature, in words sometimes almost identical withDarwin's own. 'As nature in all her modifications of life,' says thisunconscious discoverer, 'has a power of increase far beyond what isneeded to supply the place of what falls by Time's decay, thoseindividuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness,hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing—either aprey to their natural devourers, or sinking under disease, generallyinduced by want of nourishment, their place being occupied by the moreperfect of their own kind, who are pressing on the means ofexistence.... The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised lifemay, in part, be traced to[Pg 83] the extreme fecundity of nature, who, asbefore stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolificpower much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary tofill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existenceis limited and preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust,better-suited-to-circumstance individuals, who are able to struggleforward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which theyhave superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any otherkind; the weaker and less circumstance-suited being prematurelydestroyed. This principle is in constant action; it regulates thecolour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals ineach species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment orprotection from enemies, or defence from inclemencies and vicissitudesof climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength,defence, and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulatethe physical energies to self-advantage according to circumstances—insuch immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come forwardto maturity from the strict ordeal by which nature tests theiradaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue theirkind by reproduction.' Of the ideas expressed in these paragraphs, andothers which preceded them, Darwin himself rightly observes, 'He givesprecisely the same view on the origin of species as that propounded byMr. Wallace and myself. He clearly saw the full force of the principleof natural selection.'

In 1852, once more, so eminent and confirmed an evolutionist as Mr.Herbert Spencer himself had hit[Pg 84] upon a glimpse of the same great truth,strange to say without perceiving the width and scope of itsimplications. 'All mankind,' he wrote in that year in an essay onpopulation in the 'Westminster Review,' 'in turn subject themselves moreor less to the discipline described; they either may or may not advanceunder it; but, in the nature of things, only those whodo advanceunder it eventually survive. For, necessarily, families and races whomthis increasing difficulty of getting a living which excess of fertilityentails does not stimulate to improvements in production.... are on thehigh road to extinction; and must ultimately be supplanted by those whomthe pressure does so stimulate.... And here, indeed, without furtherillustration, it will be seen that premature death, under all its forms,and from all its causes, cannot fail to work in the same direction. Foras those prematurely carried off must, in the average of cases, be thosein whom the power of self-preservation is the least, it unavoidablyfollows that those left behind to continue the race must be those inwhom the power of self-preservation is the greatest, must be the selectof their generation.' In this striking pre-Darwinian passage we have apartial perception of what Mr. Spencer afterwards described as thesurvival of the fittest; but, as our great philosopher himself remarks,it 'shows how near one may be to a great generalisation without seeingit.' For not only does Mr. Spencer, like Wells before him, limit theapplication of the principle to the case of humanity; but, unlike Wells,he overlooks the all-important factor of spontaneous variation, and thepower of natural selection, acting upon such, to produce specific and[Pg 85]generic divergences of structure. In short, in his own words, theparagraph 'contains merely a passing recognition of the selectiveprocess, and indicates no suspicion of the enormous range of itseffects, or of the conditions under which a large part of its effectsare produced.' On the other hand, it must be noted that both Spencer andMatthew, like Darwin himself, based their ideas largely upon theMalthusian principle, and thus held the two true keys of the situationfairly within their unconscious hands.

Frankly to recognise these various foreshadowings of the distinctiveDarwinian theory of natural selection is not in any way to undermine thefoundations of Charles Darwin's own real and exceptional greatness. Onthe contrary, the mere fact that his views were so far anticipated byWells, Matthew, Spencer, and others, and were simultaneously arrived atacross half the globe by the independent intellect of Alfred RusselWallace, is in itself the very best proof and finest criterion ofCharles Darwin's genuine apostleship. No truly grand and fruitful ideawas ever yet the sole property of a single originator. Greatdiscoveries, says an acute critic, must always be concerned with someproblem of the time which many of the world's foremost minds are justthen cudgelling their active brains about. It was so with the discoveryof the differential calculus, and of the planet Neptune; with theinterpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and of the cuneiforminscriptions; with the undulatory theory of light, with the mechanicalequivalent of heat, with the doctrine of the correlation andconservation of energies, with the invention of the steam engine, thelocomotive, the[Pg 86] telegraph and the telephone; with the nebularhypothesis, and with spectrum analysis. It was so, too, with theevolutionary movement. The fertile upturning of virgin sod in thebiological field which produced Darwin's forerunners, as regards theidea of descent with modification, in the persons of Buffon, Lamarck,and Erasmus Darwin, necessarily produced a little later, under the freshimpetus of the Malthusian conception, his forerunners or coadjutors, asregards the idea of natural selection, in the persons of Wells, Matthew,and Wallace. It was Darwin's task to recognise the universal, whereWells and Spencer had seen only the particular; to build up a vast andirresistible inductive system, where Matthew and Wallace had but thrownout a pregnant hint of wonderfula priori interest and suggestiveness.It is one thing to draw out the idea of a campaign, another thing tocarry it to a successful conclusion; one thing rudely to sketch aground-plan, another thing finally to pile aloft to the sky the front ofan august and imposing fabric.

As soon as the papers at the Linnean had been read and printed, Darwinset to work in real earnest to bring out the first instalment of hisgreat work. That instalment was the 'Origin of Species.' The firstedition was ready for the public on November the 24th, 1859.

In his own mind Darwin regarded that immortal work merely in the lightof an abstract of his projected volumes. So immense were his collectionsand so voluminous his notes that the 'Origin of Species' itself seemedto him like a mere small portion of the contemplated publication. Andindeed he did ultimately work out several other portions of his originalplan in his[Pg 87] detailed treatises on the Variation of Animals and Plantsunder Domestication, on the Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation, andon the Descent of Man and Sexual Selection. But the immense andunexpected vogue of his first volume, the almost immediate revolutionwhich it caused in biological and general opinion, and the all butuniversal adhesion to his views of all the greatest and most risingnaturalists, to a great extent saved him the trouble of carrying out infull the task he had originally contemplated as necessary. Younger andless occupied labourers took part of the work off their leader's hands;the great chief was left to prosecute his special researches in somespecial lines, and was relieved from the necessity of further proving inminuter detail what he had already proved with sufficient cogency toconvince all but the wilfully blind or the hopelessly stupid.

The extraordinary and unprecedented success of the 'Origin of Species'is the truest test of the advance it made upon all previous evolutionarytheorising. Those who had never been convinced before were now convincedby sheer force of reasoning; those who believed and those who waveredhad their faith confirmed into something like the reposeful calm ofabsolute certitude.

Let us consider, therefore, what exactly were the additions whichCharles Darwin offered in his epoch-making work to the pre-existingconceptions of evolutionists.

In 1852, seven years before the publication of Darwin's masterpiece, Mr.Herbert Spencer wrote as follows in an essay in the 'Leader' on creationand evolution. The expressions of so profound and philosophical[Pg 88] abiologist may be regarded as the high-water mark of evolutionarythinking up to the date of the appearance of Wallace and Darwin'stheory:—

'Even could the supporters of the development hypothesis merely showthat the production of species by the process of modification isconceivable, they would be in a better position than their opponents.But they can do much more than this; they can show that the process ofmodification has effected and is effecting great changes in allorganisms, subject to modifying influences ... they can show that anyexisting species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditionsdifferent from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certainchanges of structure fitting it for the new conditions. They can showthat in successive generations these changes continue until ultimatelythe new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that incultivated plants and domesticated animals, and in the several races ofmen, these changes have uniformly taken place. They can show that thedegrees of difference, so produced, are often, as in dogs, greater thanthose on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded. Theycan show that it is a matter of dispute whether some of these modifiedformsare varieties or modified species. They can show too that thechanges daily taking place in ourselves; the facility that attends longpractice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when practice ceases; thedevelopment of every faculty, bodily, moral or intellectual, accordingto the use made of it, are all explicable on this same principle. Andthus they can show that throughout all organic nature thereis at[Pg 89]work a modifying influence of the kind they assign as the cause of thesespecific differences, an influence which, though slow in its action,does in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes; aninfluence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions ofyears, and under the great varieties of condition which geologicalrecords imply, any amount of change.'

This admirable passage, written seven years before the publication ofthe 'Origin of Species,' contains explicitly almost every idea thatordinary people, not specially biological in their interests, nowassociate with the name of Darwin. That is to say, it contains, in avery philosophical and abstract form, the theory of 'descent withmodification'without the distinctive Darwinian adjunct of 'naturalselection' or 'survival of the fittest.' Yet it was just that particularlever, dexterously applied, and carefully weighted with the whole weightof his endlessly accumulated inductive instances, that finally enabledour modern Archimedes in so short a time to move the world. The public,that was deaf to the high philosophy of Herbert Spencer, listened atonce to the practical wisdom of Charles Darwin. They did not care at allfor thea priori proof, but they believed forthwith as soon as acautious and careful investigator laid bare before their eyes in minutedetail themodus operandi of nature herself.

The main argument of Darwin's chief work runs somewhat after thefollowing fashion [2]:[Pg 90]—

Variation, to a greater or less degree, is a common and well-known factin nature. More especially, animals and plants under domestication tendto vary from one another far more than do the individuals of any onespecies in the wild state. Rabbits in a warren are all alike in shape,size, colour, and features: rabbits in a hutch vary indefinitely in thehue of their fur, the length of their ears, the character of their coat,and half a dozen other minor particulars, well known to the observantsouls of boys and fanciers. This great variability, though partlyperhaps referable to excess of food, is probably due on the whole totheir having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, andsomewhat different from, those to which the parent species is commonlyexposed in a state of nature. In other words, variability is one resultof altered and more varied surrounding circumstances.

Again, this variability is usually indefinite. You cannot say whatdirection it will take, or to what particular results it is likely inany special instance to lead. Marked differences sometimes occur evenbetween the young of the same litter, or between the seedlings sown fromthe same capsule. As a rule, the variations exhibit themselves inconnection with sexual reproduction; but sometimes, as in the case of'sporting plants,' a new bud suddenly produces leaves or flowers of adifferent character from the rest of those on the self-same stem, thusshowing that the tendency to vary is inherent, as it were, in theorganism itself. Upon this[Pg 91] fundamental fact of the existence in natureof numerous and indefinite variations, the whole theory of naturalselection is ultimately built up. In illustrating by example the immensevariability of domesticated creatures, Darwin lays great stress upon thecase of pigeons, with which he was familiar from his long experience asa breeder and fancier in his own home at Down. Naturalists are almostuniversally of opinion that all the breeds of domestic pigeons, from thecarrier to the tumbler, from the runt to the fantail, are alikedescended from the wild rock pigeon of the European coasts. The immenseamount of variation which this original species has undergone indomestication may be seen by comparing the numberless breeds of pigeonnow exhibited at all our poultry shows with one another.

But variation gives us only half the elements of the ultimate problem,even in the case of domestic kinds. For the other half, we must haverecourse to human selection, which, by picking out for seed or breedingpurposes certain specially favoured varieties, has produced at last allthe purposive or intentional diversity between the different existingstocks or breeds. In these artificially produced domestic races we seeeverywhere special adaptations to man's particular use or fancy. Thedray-horse has been fashioned for purposes of strength andsure-footedness in draught, the race-horse for purposes of fleetness inrunning. In the fox-hound, man has encouraged the special propertiesthat tend to produce a good day's hunting; in the sheepdog, those thatmake for the better maintenance and safety of a herd. The cauliflower isa cabbage, with specialised and somewhat abortive flower-heads; the[Pg 92]fuller's teasel is a sport of the wild form, with curved hooks speciallyadapted by a freak of nature for the teasing of wool. So in every caseman, by deliberately picking out for breeding or seeding purposes theaccidental variations which happened best to suit his own needs, hassucceeded at last in producing races admirably fitted in the minutestparticulars for the special functions to which they are applied. Thereappears indeed to be hardly any limit to the almost infinite plasticityand modifiability of domestic animals. 'It would seem,' said a greatsheep-breeder, speaking of sheep, 'as if farmers had chalked out upon awall a form perfect in itself, and then proceeded to give it existence.'

Now, what is thus true within narrow limits, and in a short space oftime about the deliberate action of man, Darwin showed to be also truewithin wider limits and spread over longer geological epochs about theunconscious action of nature. And herein consisted his great advanceupon the earlier evolutionism of Lamarck, Goethe, and Erasmus Darwin.For while these instinctive pioneers of the evolutionary spirit sawclearly that animals and plants betrayed signs of common descent fromone or a few original ancestors, they did not see what was the mechanismby which such organisms had been differentiated into so many distinctgenera and species. They caught, indeed, at the analogy of variationunder domestication and in the wild state, but they missed the subtlerand deeper analogy between human and natural selection. Now, variationalone would give us a world consisting not of definite kinds fairly welldemarcated one from the other, but of innumerable unclassified andunorganisable individuals, all shading off[Pg 93] indefinitely one into theother, and incapable of being reduced by human ingenuity to any orderlyhierarchical system. Furthermore, it would give us creatures withoutspecial adaptation of any kind to the peculiar circumstances of theirown environment. To account for adaptation, for the almost perfectfitness of every plant and every animal to its position in life, for theexistence (in other words) of definitely correlated parts and organs, wemust call in the aid of survival of the fittest. Without that potentselective agent, our conception of the becoming of life is a mere chaos;order and organisation are utterly inexplicable save by the brilliantilluminating ray of the Darwinian principle. That is why Darwindestroyed at one blow the specious arguments of the early teleologists;he showed that where Chambers and even Erasmus Darwin had seen theworking of a final cause, we ought rather to recognise the working of anefficient cause, whose outcome necessarily but fallaciously simulatesthe supposed features of ana priori finality.

From art, then, Darwin harks back once more to nature. He proceeds toshow that variability occurs among all wild plants and animals, thoughnot so frequently under ordinary circumstances as in the case ofdomesticated species. Individual differences everywhere occur betweenplant and plant, between animal and animal. Sometimes these differencesare so very numerous that it is impossible to divide the individuals atall into well-marked kinds; for example, among British wild-roses,brambles, hawkweeds and epilobes, with a few other very variablefamilies, Babington makes as many as 251 distinct species, whereBentham[Pg 94] gives only 112—a margin of 139 doubtful forms of shadowyindefiniteness. Varieties, in fact, are always arising, and dominantspecies in particular always tend to vary most in every direction. Thereason why variation is not so marked in the wild state as underdomestication is of course because the conditions are there lessdiverse; but where the conditions of wild things are most diverse, as inthe case of dominant kinds, which range over a wide space of country orof ocean, abundant individual variations habitually occur. Localvarieties thus produced are regarded by Darwin as incipient species:they are the raw material on which natural selection gradually exertsitself in the struggle for existence.

Granting individual variability, then, how do species arise in nature?And how are all the exquisite adaptations of part to whole, and of wholeto environment, gradually initiated, improved, and perfected?

For the world is perpetually over-populated. It is not, as many goodpeople fearfully imagine, on a half-comprehension of the Malthusianprinciple, shortly going to be over-populated; it is now, it has alwaysbeen, and it will always be, pressed close up to the utmost possiblelimit of population. Reproduction is everywhere and in all species forever outrunning means of subsistence; and starvation or competition isfor ever keeping down the number of the offspring to the level of theaverage or normal supply of raw material. A single red campion producesin a year three thousand seeds; but there are not this year threethousand times[Pg 95] as many red campions as there were last summer, nor willthere be three thousand times as many more in the succeeding season. Theroe of a cod contains sometimes nearly ten million eggs; but supposingeach of these produced a young fish which arrived at maturity, the wholesea would immediately become a solid mass of closely packed codfish.Linnæus reckoned that if an annual plant had two seeds, each of whichproduced two seedlings in the succeeding season, and so on continually,in twenty years their progeny would amount to a million plants. Astruggle for existence necessarily results from this universal tendencyof animals and plants to increase faster than the means of subsistence,whether those means be food, as in the first case, or carbonic acid,water, and sunshine as in the second. Animals are all perpetuallybattling with one another for the food-supply of the moment; plants areperpetually battling with one another for their share of the soil, therainfall, and the sunshine.

The case of the plant is a very important one to understand in thisconnection, because it is probable that most people greatlymisunderstand the biological meaning of the phrase 'struggle forexistence.' They imagine that the struggle is chiefly conducted betweendifferent species, whereas in reality it is chiefly conducted betweenmembers of the same species. It is not so much the battle between thetiger and the antelope, between the wolf and the bison, between thesnake and the bird, that ultimately results in natural selection orsurvival of the fittest, as the struggle between tiger and tiger,between bison and bison, between snake and snake, between antelope andantelope. A human[Pg 96] analogy may help to make this difficult principle alittle clearer. The baker does not fear the competition of the butcherin the struggle for life: it is the competition of the other bakers thatsometimes inexorably crushes him out of existence. The lawyer does notpress hard upon the doctor, nor the architect upon the journeymanpainter. A war in the Soudan or in South Africa is far less fatal to theworkman in our great towns than the ceaseless competition of hisfellow-workmen. It is not the soldier that kills the artisan, but thenumber of other artisans who undersell him and crowd to fill up everyvacant position. In this way the great enemies of the individualherbivore are not the carnivores, but the other herbivores. The lioneats the antelope, to be sure; but the real struggle lies between lionand lion for a fair share of meat, or between antelope and antelope fora fair share of pasturage.Homo homini lupus, says the old proverb,and so, we may add, in a wider sense,lupus lupo lupus, also. Ofcourse, the carnivore plays a great part in the selective process; buthe is the selector only; the real competition is between the selected.Now, let us take the case of the plant. A thousand seedlings occupy thespace where few alone can ultimately grow; and between these seedlingsthe struggle is fierce, the strongest and best adapted ultimatelysurviving. To take Darwin's own example, the mistletoe, which is aparasite, cannot truly be said to struggle with the apple tree on whichit fastens; for if too many parasites cover a tree, it perishes, and sothey kill themselves as well as their host, all alike dying together.But several seedling mistletoes growing together on the same branch may[Pg 97]fairly be said to struggle with one another for light and air; and sincemistletoe seeds are disseminated by birds and dropped by them in theangles of branches, the mistletoe may also be said to compete with otherberry-bearing bushes, like cornel and hawthorn, for the ministrations ofthe fruit-eating birds. The struggle is fierce between allied kinds, andfiercest of all between individual members of the same species.

Owing to this constant struggle, variations, however slight, and fromwhatever cause arising, if in any degree profitable to the individualwhich presents them, will tend to the preservation of the particularorganism, and, being on the average inherited by its offspring, willsimilarly tend to increase and multiply in the world at large. This isthe principle of natural selection or survival of the fittest—the greatprinciple which Darwin and Wallace added to the evolutionism of Lamarckand his successors.

Let us take a single concrete example. In the desert, with itsmonotonous sandy colouring, a black insect or a white insect, still morea red insect or a blue insect, would be immediately detected andpromptly devoured by its natural enemies, the birds and lizards. But anygreyish or yellowish insects would be less likely to attract attentionat first sight, and would be overlooked as long as there were any moreconspicuous individuals of their own kind about for the birds andlizards to feed on at their leisure. Hence, in a very short time, thedesert would be depopulated of all but the greyest and yellowestinsects; and among these the birds would pick out those which differedmost markedly in hue or shade from the sand around them. But those[Pg 98]which happened to vary most in the direction of a sandy or spotty colourwould be most likely to survive, and to become the parents of futuregenerations. Thus, in the course of long ages, all the insects whichinhabit deserts have become sand-coloured; because the least sandy wereperpetually picked out for destruction by their ever-watchful foes,while the most sandy escaped and multiplied and replenished the earthwith their own likes.

Conversely, the birds and the lizards again would probably begin bybeing black, and white, and blue, and green, like most other birds andlizards in the world generally. But the insect would have ample warningof the near approach of such conspicuous self-advertising enemies, andwould avoid them accordingly whenever they appeared within range of hislimited vision, either by lying close, or by shamming death, or byretreating precipitately to holes and crannies. Therefore, whateverindividual birds or lizards happened to vary most in the direction ofgrey or sand-colour, and so to creep unobserved upon the unguardedinsects, would succeed best on the average in catching beetles or desertgrasshoppers. Hence, by the slow dying out of the more highly colouredand distinctive insect-eaters, before the severe competition of thegreyest and sandiest, all the birds and lizards of the desert havebecome at last as absolutely sand-coloured as the insects themselves.Only the greyest insect could escape the bird; only the greyest bird,en revanche, could surprise and devour the unwary insect.

Sir Charles Lyell and the elder De Candolle had already seen the greatimportance of the struggle for existence in the organic world, butneither of them had observed the magnificent corollary of naturalselection,[Pg 99] which flows from it almost as a mathematical necessity whenonce suggested; for, given indefinite variability, and a geometrical,rate of increase, it must needs follow that some varieties will bebetter suited to the circumstances than others, and therefore that theywill survive on the average in increased proportions. A passage from oneof Lyell's early letters will show how near he too went to this greatluminous generalisation, and yet how utterly he missed the trueimplications of his own vague and chaotic idea. He writes thus to SirJohn Herschel in 1836, while Darwin was still but homeward bound on thevoyage of the 'Beagle':—

'In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to findthat you think it probable that it may be carried on through theintervention of intermediate causes.... An insect may be made in one ofits transformations to resemble a dead stick, or a leaf, or a lichen, ora stone, so as to be somewhat less easily found by its enemies; or ifthis would make it too strong, an occasional variety of the species mayhave this advantage conferred on it; or if this would be still too much,one sex of a certain variety. Probably there is scarcely a dash ofcolour on the wing or body of which the choice would be quite arbitrary,or which might not affect its duration for thousands of years.'

Now, this comes in some ways perilously near to Darwin indeed; but inthe most important point of all it is wide apart from him as the pole isfrom the equator. For Lyell thought of all this as a matter of externalteleological arrangement; he imagined a deliberate power from outsidesettling it all by design beforehand, and granting to varieties orspecies these[Pg 100] special peculiarities in a manner that was at bottomessentially supernatural, or in other words miraculous; whereas Darwinthinks of it as the necessary result of the circumstances themselves, aninevitable outcome of indefinite variabilityplus the geometrical rateof increase. Where Lyell sees a final cause, Darwin sees an efficientcause; and this distinction is fundamental. It marks Darwin's positionas that of a great philosophical thinker, who can dash aside at once allmetaphysical cobwebs, and penetrate to the inmost recesses of things,unswerved by the vain but specious allurements of obvious and misleadingteleological fallacies.

Darwin also laid great stress on the immense complexity of the relationswhich animals and plants bear to one another, in the struggle forexistence. For example, on the heathy uplands near Farnham in Surrey,large spaces were at one time enclosed, on which, within ten years,self-grown fir-trees from the wind-borne seeds of distant clumps sprangup so thickly as actually to choke one another with their tiny branches.All over the heaths outside, when Darwin looked for them, he could notfind a single fir, except the old clumps on the hilltops, from which theseedlings themselves had originally sprung. But, on looking closer amongthe stems of the heath, he descried a number of very tiny firs, whichhad been perpetually browsed down by the cattle on the commons; and oneof them, with twenty-six rings of growth, had during many yearsendeavoured unsuccessfully to raise its head above the surroundingheather. Hence, as soon as the land was enclosed, and the cattleexcluded, it became covered at once with a thick growth of vigorous[Pg 101]young fir-trees. Yet who would ever have supposed beforehand that themere presence or absence of cattle would absolutely have determined thevery existence of the Scotch fir throughout a wide range of well-adaptedsandy English upland?

To take another curious instance mentioned by Darwin. In Paraguay,unlike the greater part of neighbouring South America, neither horsesnor cattle have ever run wild. This is due to the presence of aparasitic fly, which lays its eggs in their bodies when first born, themaggots killing off the tender young in their first stages. But if anycause were to alter the number of the dangerous flies, then cattle andwild horses would abound; and this would alter the vegetation, as Darwinhimself observed in other parts of America; and the change in thevegetation would affect the insects; and that again the insectivorousbirds; and so on in ever widening circles of incalculable complexity.Once more, to quote the most famous instance of all, the visits ofhumble-bees are absolutely necessary in order to place the pollen in theright position for setting the seeds of purple clover. Heads from whichDarwin excluded the bees produced no seeds at all. Hence, if humble-beesbecame extinct in England, the red clover, too, would die off: andindeed, in New Zealand, where there are no humble-bees, and where theefforts to introduce them for this very purpose have been uniformlyunsuccessful, the clover never sets its seed at all, and fresh stockshave to be imported at great expense every year from Europe. But thenumber of humble-bees in any district largely depends upon the number offield-mice, which destroy the combs and[Pg 102] nests in immense quantities.The number of mice, again, is greatly affected by the proportion of catsin the neighbourhood; so that Colonel Newman, who paid much attention tothis subject, found humble-bees most numerous in the neighbourhood ofvillages and small towns, an effect which he attributed to the abundanceof cats, and the consequent scarcity of the destructive field-mice. Yethere once more, who could suppose beforehand that the degree to whichthe purple clover set its seeds was in part determined by the number ofcats kept in houses in the surrounding district?

One of Darwin's own favourite examples of the action of naturalselection, which he afterwards expanded largely in his work on Orchidsand in several other volumes, is that which relates to the origin ofconspicuous flowers. Many plants have a sweet excretion, which iseliminated sometimes even by the leaves, as in the case of the commonlaurel. This juice, though small in quantity, is eagerly sought andeaten by insects. Now let us suppose that, in some variety of aninconspicuous flower, similar nectar was produced in the neighbourhoodof the petals and stamens. Insects, in seeking the nectar, would dusttheir bodies over with the pollen, and would carry it away with them tothe next flower visited. This would result in an act of crossing; andthat act, as Darwin afterwards abundantly proved in a separate and verylaborious treatise, gives rise to exceptionally vigorous seedlings,which would therefore have the best chance of flourishing and survivingin the struggle for existence. The flowers which produced most honeywould oftenest be visited, and oftenest crossed; so that they wouldfinally form a new[Pg 103] species. The more brightly coloured among them,again, would be more readily discriminated than the less brightlycoloured; and this would give them such an advantage that in the longrun, as we actually see, almost all habitually insect-fertilised flowerswould come to have brilliant petals. The germ of this luminous idea,once more, is to be found in Sprengel's remarkable work on thefertilisation of flowers—a work far in advance of its time in manyways, and to which Darwin always expressed his deep obligations; but, asin so many other instances, while Sprengel looked upon all the littlemodifications and adaptations of flower and insect to one another as theresult of distinct creative design, Darwin looked upon them as theresult of natural selection, working upon the basis of indeterminatespontaneous variations.

How do these variations arise? Not by chance, of course (for in thestrict scientific sense nothing on earth can be considered as reallyfortuitous), but as the outcome for the most part of very minute organiccauses, whose particular action it is impossible for us to predict withour present knowledge. Some physical cause in each case there mustnecessarily be; and indeed it is often possible to show that certainchanges of condition in the parent do result in variations in theoffspring, though what special direction the variation will take cannever be foretold with any accuracy. In short, our ignorance of the lawsof variation is profound, but our knowledge of the fact is clear andcertain. The fact alone is essential to the principle of naturalselection; the cause, though in itself an interesting subject ofinquiry, may be safely laid aside for the present as[Pg 104] comparativelyunimportant. What we have actually given to us in the concrete universeis, organisms varying perpetually in minute points, and a rapid rate ofincrease causing every minute point of advantage to be exceptionallyfavoured in the struggle for existence.

But Darwin is remarkable among all broachers of new theories for theextraordinary candour and openness of his method. He acknowledgedbeforehand all the difficulties in the way of his theory, and though hehimself confessed that some of them were serious (a statement whichsubsequent research has often rendered unnecessary), he met many of themwith cogent arguments by anticipation, and demolished objections beforethey could even be raised against him by hostile critics. Of theseobjections, only two need here be mentioned. The first is the question,why is not all nature even now a confused mass of transitional forms?Why do genera and species exist as we see them at present in broaddistinction one from the other? To this Darwin answers rightly that,where the process of species-making is still going on, we do actuallyfind fine gradations and transitional forms existing between genera,varieties, and species.[3] But, furthermore, as natural selection actssolely by the preservation of useful modifications, each better-adaptednew form will always tend in a fully stocked country to oust andexterminate its own unimproved parent type, as well as all othercompeting but less perfect varieties. Thus natural selection andextinction of intermediates go for ever[Pg 105] hand in hand. The more perfectthe new variety, the more absolutely will it kill off the intermediateforms. The second great difficulty lies in the question of the origin ofinstinct, which, as Darwin shows, by careful inductive instances, mayhave arisen by the slow and gradual accumulation of numerous slight yetprofitable variations.

I have dwelt at some length upon those portions of the 'Origin ofSpecies' which deal in detail with the theory of natural selection, thechief contribution which Darwin made to the evolutionary movement,because it is impossible otherwise fully to understand the great gulfwhich separates his evolutionism from the earlier evolutionism ofLamarck and his followers. But it is impracticable here to give any ideaof the immense wealth of example and illustration which Darwin broughtto the elucidation of every part of his complex problem. In order togain a full conception of this side of his nature, we must turn to theoriginal treatise itself, and still more to the subsequent volumes inwhich the ground-work of observations and experiments on which he basedhis theory was more fully detailed for the specialist public.

The remainder of Darwin's epoch-making work deals, strictly speaking,rather with the general theory of 'descent with modification' than withthe special doctrine of natural selection. It restates and reinforces,by the light of the new additional concept, and with fuller facts andlater knowledge, the four great arguments already known in favour oforganic evolution as a whole, the argument from Geological Succession,the argument from Geographical Distribution, the argument[Pg 106] fromEmbryological Development, and the argument from ClassificatoryAffinities. Each of these we may briefly summarise.

The geological record is confessedly imperfect. At the time when Darwinfirst published the 'Origin of Species,' it had disclosed to our viewcomparatively few intermediate or transitional forms between the chiefgreat classes of plants or animals; since that time, in singularconfirmation of the Darwinian hypothesis, it has disclosed an immensenumber of such connecting types, amongst which may be more particularlynoticed the 'missing links' between the birds and reptiles, theancestors of the horses, the camels, and the pigs, and the commonprogenitor of the ruminants and the pachyderms, two great groups classedby Cuvier as distinct orders—all of which instances were incorporatedby Darwin in later editions of his 'Origin of Species.' But, apart fromthese special and newly discovered cases, the whole general course ofgeological history 'agrees admirably with the theory of descent withmodification through variation and natural selection.' The simpleranimals of early times are followed by the more complex and morespecialised animals of later geological periods. As each main group ofanimals appears upon the stage of life, it appears in a very central and'generalised' form; as time goes on, we find its various membersdiffering more and more widely from one another, and assuming more andmore specialised adaptive forms. And in each country it is found, as arule, that the extinct animals of the later formations bear a closegeneral resemblance and relationship to the animals which now inhabitthe same regions. For example,[Pg 107] the fossil mammals from the Australiancaves are nearly allied to the modern kangaroos, phalangers, andwombats; and the gigantic extinct sloths and armadillos of South Americaare reproduced in their smaller representatives at the present day. So,too, the moa of New Zealand was a huge apteryx; and the birdsdisentombed from the bone-caves of Brazil show close affinities to thetoucans and jacanars that still scream and flit in countless flocksamong Brazilian forests. The obvious implication is that the animals nowinhabiting any given area are the modified descendants of those thatformerly inhabited it. 'On the theory of descent with modification, thegreat law of the succession of the same types within the same areas isat once explained.'

This last consideration leads us up to the argument from GeographicalDistribution. In considering the various local faunas and floras on theface of the globe, no point strikes one more forcibly than the fact thatneither their similarities nor their dissimilarities can be accountedfor by climate or physical conditions. The animals of South Africa donot in the least resemble the animals of the corresponding belt of SouthAmerica; the Australian beasts and birds and trees are utterly unlikethose of France and Germany; the fishes and crustaceans of the Pacificat Panama are widely different from those of the Caribbean at the samepoint, separated from them only by the narrow belt of interveningisthmus. On the other hand, within the same continuous areas of sea orland, however great the differences of physical conditions, we findeverywhere closely related types in possession of the most distinct and[Pg 108]varied situations. On the burning plains of La Plata we get the agoutiand the bizcacha as the chief rodents; we ascend the Cordillera, andclose to the eternal snows we discover, not hares and rabbits like thoseof Europe, but a specialised chilly mountain form of the same distinctlySouth American type. We turn to the rivers, and we see no musk-rat orbeaver, but the coypu and capybara, slightly altered varieties of theoriginal bizcacha ancestor. Australia has no wolf, but it has insteadfierce and active carnivorous marsupials; it has no mice, but some ofits tiny kangaroo-like creatures fulfil analogous functions in itsanimal economy. Everywhere the evidence points to the conclusion thatlocal species have been locally evolved from pre-existing similarspecies. The oceanic isles, of which Darwin had had so large anexperience, and especially his old friends the Galapagos, come inusefully for this stage of the question. They are invariably inhabited,as Darwin pointed out, and as Wallace has since abundantly shown in theminutest detail, by waifs and strays from neighbouring continents,altered and specialised by natural selection in accordance with theconditions of their new habitat. As a rule, they point back to thedistricts whence blow the strongest and most prevalent winds; and themodifications they have undergone are largely dependent upon the natureof the other species with which they have to compete, or to whose habitsthey must needs accommodate themselves. In such cases it is easy to seehow far Darwin's special conception of natural selection helps toexplain and account for facts not easily explicable by the olderevolutionism of mere descent with modification.[Pg 109]

Embryology, the study of early development in the individual animal orplant, also throws much side light upon the nature and ancestry of eachspecies or family. For example, gorse, which is a member of thepea-flower tribe, has in its adult stage solid, spiny, thorn-likeleaves, none of which in the least resemble the foliage of the clover,to which it is closely related; but the young seedling in its earlieststages has trefoil leaves, which only slowly pass by infinitesimalgradations into flat blades and finally into the familiar defensiveprickles. Here, natural selection under stress of herbivorous animals onopen heaths and commons has spared only those particular gorse-busheswhich varied in the direction of the stiffest and most inedible foliage;but the young plant in its first days still preserves for us the trefoilleaf which it shared originally with a vast group of clover-likecongeners. The adult barnacle, once more, presents a certain fallaciousexternal resemblance to a mollusk, and was actually so classed even bythe penetrating and systematic intellect of Cuvier; but a glance at thelarva shows an instructed eye at once that it is really a shell-makingand abnormal crustacean. On a wider scale, the embryos of mammals are atfirst indistinguishable from those of birds or reptiles; the feet oflizards, the hoofs of horses, the hands of man, the wings of the bat,the pinions of birds, all arise from the same fundamental shapeless bud,in the same spot of an almost identical embryo. Even the human foetus,at a certain stage of its development, is provided with gill-slits,which point dimly back to the remote ages when its ancestor wassomething very like a fish. The embryo is a picture, more or less[Pg 110]obscured and blurred in its outline, of the common progenitor of a wholegreat class of plants or animals.

Finally, classification points in the same way to the affiliation of allexisting genera and species upon certain early divergent ancestors. Thewhole scheme of the biological system, as initiated by Linnæus andimproved by Cuvier, Jussieu, De Candolle, and their successors, isessentially that of a genealogical tree. The prime central vertebrateancestor—to take the case of the creatures most familiar to the generalreader—appears to have been an animal not unlike the existing lancelet,a mud-haunting, cartilaginous, undeveloped fish, whose main lineamentsare also embryologically preserved for us in the ascidian larva and thecommon tadpole. From this early common centre have been developed,apparently, in one direction the fishes, and in another the amphibiantribes of frogs, newts, salamanders, and axolotls. From an earlyamphibian, again, the common ancestor of birds, reptiles, and mammalsseems to have diverged: the intermediate links between bird and reptilebeing faintly traced among the extinct deinosaurians and thearchæopteryx, some years subsequently to the first appearance of the'Origin of Species;' while the ornithorhyncus, which to some extentconnects the mammals, and especially the marsupials, with the loweregg-laying types of vertebrate, was already well-known and thoroughlystudied before the publication of Darwin's great work. Throughout, theindications given by all the chief tribes of animals and plants pointback to slow descent and divergence from common ancestors; and all thesubsequent course of palæontological research has supplied us rapidly,one after[Pg 111] another, with the remains of just such undifferentiatedfamily starting-points.

Stress has mainly been laid, in this brief and necessarily imperfectabstract, on the essentially Darwinian principle of natural selection.But Darwin did not himself attribute everything to this potent factor inthe moulding of species. 'I am convinced,' he wrote pointedly in theintroduction to his first edition, 'that natural selection has been themain but not the exclusive means of modification.' He attributedconsiderable importance as well to the Lamarckian principle of use anddisuse, already so fully insisted upon before him by Mr. HerbertSpencer. The chief factors in his compound theory, as given in his ownwords at the end of his work, areas follows: 'Growth with Reproduction;Inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability, fromthe indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from useand disuse; a Ratio of Increase, so high as to lead to a Struggle forLife, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence ofCharacter, and the Extinction of the less improved forms. Thus, from thewar of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which weare capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals,directly follows.'

Such was the simple and inoffensive-looking bombshell which Darwinlaunched from his quiet home at Down into the very midst of theteleological camp in the peaceful year 1859. Subsequent generations willremember the date as a crisis and turning-point in the history ofmankind.

[2] The remainder of the present chapter, which consists almostentirely of an exposition of the doctrine of natural selection, maysafely be skipped by the reader already well acquainted with the Originof Species. The abstract is taken for the most part from the latest andfullest enlarged edition, but attention is usually called in passing tothe points which did not appear in the first issue of 1859.

[3] The researches of Seebohm and others have since proved thatthis is really the case to a far greater extent than Darwin was aware ofin 1859, or, indeed, till many years afterward.[Pg 112]

CHAPTER VII.

THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS.

So far as the scientific world was concerned the 'Origin of Species'fell, like a grain of mustard seed, upon good and well-prepared ground;the plant that sprang from it grew up forthwith into a great and statelytree, that overshadowed with its spreading branches all the corners ofthe earth.

The soil, indeed, had been carefully broken for it beforehand: Lamarckand St. Hilaire, Spencer and Chambers, had ploughed and harrowed in alldiligence; and the minds of men were thoroughly ready for theassimilation of the new doctrine. But the seed itself, too, was theright germ for the exact moment; it contained within itself thevivifying principle that enabled it to grow and wax exceeding greatwhere kindred germs before had withered away, or had borne but scantyand immature fruit.

First for the less important external consideration. Darwin himself wasa sound man with an established reputation for solidity and learning.That gained for his theory from the very first outset universal respect[Pg 113]and a fair hearing. Herbert Spencer was known to be a philosopher: andthe practical English nation mistrusts philosophers: those people probetoo deep and soar too high for any sensible person to follow them in alltheir flights. Robert Chambers, the unknown author of 'Vestiges ofCreation,' was a shallow sciolist; it was whispered abroad that he waseven inaccurate and slovenly in his facts: and your scientific plodderdetests the very shadow of minute inaccuracy, though it speak with thetongues of men and angels, and be bound up with all the grasp and powerof a Newton or a Goethe. But Charles Darwin was a known personage, anF.R.S., a distinguished authority upon coral reefs and barnacles, agreat geologist, a great biologist, a great observer and indefatigablecollector. His book came into the public hands stamped with theimprimatur of official recognition. Darwin was the father of the infanttheory; Lyell and Hooker stood for its sponsors. The world could notafford to despise its contents; they could not brand its author offhandas a clever dreamer or a foolish amateur, or consign him to the dreadedEnglish limbo of the 'mere theorist.'

Next, for the other and far more important internal consideration. Thebook itself was one of the greatest, the most learned, the most lucid,the most logical, the most crushing, the most conclusive, that the worldhad ever yet seen. Step by step, and principle by principle, it provedevery point in its progress triumphantly before it went on todemonstrate the next. So vast an array of facts so thoroughly in handhad never before been mustered and marshalled in favour of anybiological theory. Those who had insight to learn and[Pg 114] understand wereconvinced at once by the cogency of the argument; those who had not wereoverpowered and silenced by the weight of the authority and the mass ofthe learning. A hot battle burst forth at once, no doubt, around thesuccessful volume; but it was one of those battles which are arousedonly by great truths,—a battle in which the victory is a foregoneconclusion, and the rancour of the assailants the highest compliment tothe prowess of the assailed.

Darwin himself, in his quiet country home at Down, was simply astonishedat the rapid success of his own work. The first edition was published atthe end of November 1859; it was exhausted almost immediately, and asecond was got ready in hot haste by the beginning of January 1860. Inless than six weeks the book had become famous, and Darwin found himselfthe centre of a European contest, waged with exceeding bitterness, overthe truth or falsity of his wonderful volume. To the world at largeDarwinism and evolution became at once synonymous terms. The same peoplewho would entirely ascribe the Protestant Reformation to the account ofLuther, and the inductive philosophy to the account of Bacon, alsobelieved, in the simplicity of their hearts, that the whole vastevolutionary movement was due at bottom to that very insidious anddangerous book of Mr. Darwin's.

The fact is, profound as had been the impulses in the evolutionarydirection among men of science before Darwin's work appeared at all,immense as were the throes and pangs of labour throughout all Europewhich preceded and accompanied its actual birth, when it came at last itcame to the general world of unscientific readers with all the suddenvividness and novelty of a[Pg 115] tremendous earthquake. Long predestined, itwas yet wholly unexpected. Men at large had known nothing or next tonothing of this colossal but hidden revolutionary force which had beengathering head and energy for so many years unseen within the bowels ofthe earth; and now that its outer manifestation had actually burst uponthem, they felt the solid ground of dogmatic security bodily giving waybeneath their feet, and knew not where to turn in their extremity forsupport. Naturally, it was the theological interest that felt itself atfirst most forcibly assailed. The first few chapters of Genesis, orrather the belief in their scientific and historical character, alreadysapped by the revelations of geology, seemed to orthodox defenders to befatally undermined if the Darwinian hypothesis were once to meet withgeneral recognition. The first resource of menaced orthodoxy is alwaysto deny the alleged facts; the second is to patch up tardily the feebleand hollowmodus vivendi of an artificial pact. On this occasion theorthodox acted strictly after their kind: but to their credit it shouldbe added that they yielded gracefully in the long run to the unanimousvoice of scientific opinion. Twenty-three years later, when all that wasmortal of Charles Darwin was being borne with pomp and pageantry to itslast resting-place in Westminster Abbey, enlightened orthodoxy, withgenerous oblivion, ratified a truce over the dead body of the greatleader, and, outgrowing its original dread of naturalisticinterpretations, accepted his theory without reserve as 'not necessarilyhostile to the main fundamental truths of religion.' Let us renderjustice to the vanquished in a memorable struggle. Churchmen[Pg 116] followedrespectfully to the grave with frank and noble inconsistency thehonoured remains of the very teacher whom less than a quarter of acentury earlier they had naturally dreaded as loosening the traditionalfoundations of all accepted religion and morality.

But if the attack was fierce and bitter, the defence was assisted by asudden access of powerful forces from friendly quarters. A few of theelder generation of naturalists held out, indeed, for various shorter orlonger periods; some of them never came into the camp at all, butlingered on, left behind, like stragglers from the onward march, by theyounger biologists, in isolated non-conformity on the lonely heights ofaustere officialism. Their business was to ticket and docket andpigeon-hole, not to venture abroad on untried wings into the airyregions of philosophical speculation. The elder men, in fact, had manyof them lost that elasticity and modifiability of intellect which isnecessary for the reception of new and revolutionary fundamentalconcepts. A mind that has hardened down into the last stage of extremematurity may assimilate fresh facts and fresh minor principles, but itcannot assimilate fresh synthetic systems of the entire cosmos.Moreover, some of the elder thinkers were committed beforehand toopposing views, with which they lacked either the courage or theintellectual power to break; while others were entangled by religiousrestrictions, and unable to free themselves from the cramping fetters ofa narrow orthodoxy. But even among his own contemporaries and seniorsDarwin found not a few whose minds were thoroughly prepared beforehandfor the reception of his lucid and luminous hypothesis; while theyounger naturalists,[Pg 117] with the plasticity of youth, assimilated almostto a man, with the utmost avidity, the great truths thus showered downupon them by the preacher of evolution.

Sir Joseph Hooker and Professor Huxley were among the first to give intheir adhesion and stand up boldly for the new truth by the side of thereckless and disturbing innovator. In June 1859, nearly a year after thereading of the Darwin-Wallace papers at the Linnean Society, but fivemonths previously to the publication of the 'Origin of Species,' Huxleylectured at the Royal Institution on 'Persistent Types of Animal Life,'and declared against the old barren theory of successive creations, infavour of the new and fruitful hypothesis of gradual modification. InDecember 1859, a month later than the appearance of Darwin's book,Hooker published his 'Introduction to the Flora of Australia,' in thefirst part of which he championed the belief in the descent andmodification of species, and enforced his views by many originalobservations drawn from the domain of botanical science. For fifteenyears, as Darwin himself gratefully observed in his introduction to the'Origin of Species,' that learned botanist had shared the secret ofnatural selection, and aided its author in every possible way by hislarge stores of knowledge and his excellent judgment. Bates, thenaturalist on the Amazons, followed fast with his beautiful and strikingtheory of mimicry, a crucial instance well explained. The facts of thestrange disguises which birds and insects often assume had long beenpresent to his acute mind, and he hailed with delight the discovery ofthe new principle, which at once enabled him to reduce[Pg 118] them with easeto symmetry and order. To Herbert Spencer, an evolutionist in fibre fromthe very beginning, the fresh doctrine of natural selection came like apowerful ally and an unexpected assistant in deciphering the deepfundamental problems on which he was at that moment actually engaged;and in his 'Principles of Biology,' even then in contemplation, he atonce adopted and utilised the new truth with all the keen and vigorousinsight of his profound analytic and synthetic intellect. The first partof that important work was issued to subscribers just three years afterthe original appearance of the 'Origin of Species;' the first volume wasfully completed in October 1864. It is to Mr. Spencer that we owe thepellucid expression 'survival of the fittest,' which conveys even betterthan Darwin's own phrase, 'natural selection,' the essential elementadded by the 'Origin of Species' to the pre-existing evolutionaryconception.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science held its bigannual doctrinaire picnic the next summer after the publication ofDarwin's book, at Oxford. The Oxford meeting was a stormy and awell-remembered one. The 'Origin of Species' was there discussed andattacked before a biological section strangely enough presided over byDarwin's old Cambridge teacher, Professor Henslow. Though then abeneficed parish priest, Henslow had the boldness frankly to avow hisown acceptance of his great pupil's startling conclusions. Huxleyfollowed in the same path, as did also Lubbock and Hooker. On the whole,the evolutionists were already in the ascendant; the fresh youngintellects especially being quick to seize[Pg 119] upon the new pabulum sogenerously dealt out to them by the new evolutionism.

Among scientific minds of the first order, Lyell alone in England,heavily weighted by theological preconceptions, for awhile hung back.All his life long, as his letters show us, the great geologist had feltthe powerful spell of the Lamarckian hypothesis continually enticing himwith its seductive charm. He had fought against it blindly, in thepassionate endeavour to preserve what he thought his higher faith in theseparate and divine creation of man; but ever and anon he returned anewto the biological Circe with a fresh fascination, as the moth returns tothe beautiful flame that has scorched and singed it. In a well-knownpassage in the earlier editions of his 'Principles of Geology,' thefather of uniformitarianism gives at length his own reasons fordissenting from the doctrine of evolution as then set forth; and evenafter Darwin's discovery had supplied him with a new clue, averacausa, a sufficient power for the modification of species into freshforms, theological difficulties made him cling still as long as possibleto the old theory of the origin of man which he loved to describe asthat of the 'archangel ruined.' He was loth to exchange this cherishedbelief for the degrading alternative (as it approved itself to him) ofthe ape elevated. But in the end, with the fearless honesty of asearcher after truth, he gave way slowly and regretfully. Always lookingback with something like remorse to the flesh-pots of the ecclesiasticalEgypt, with its enticing visions of fallen grandeur, the great thinkerwhose uniformitarian theory of geology had more than aught else pavedthe way for the gradual[Pg 120] acceptance of Darwin's evolutionism, came outat last from the house of bondage, and nobly ranged himself on the sideof what his intellect judged to be the truth of nature, though hisemotions urged him hard to blind his judgment and to neglect its lightsfor an emotional figment. Science has no more pathetic figure than thatof the old philosopher, in his sixty-sixth year, throwing himself withall the eagerness of youth into what he had long considered the wrongscale, and vigorously wrecking in the 'Antiquity of Man' what seemed tothe dimmed vision of his own emotional nature the very foundations ofhis beloved creed. But still he did it. He came out and was separate. Inhis own idiomatic language, he found at last that 'we must go the wholeourang;' and, deep as was the pang that the recantation cost him, heformally retracted the condemnation of 'transformism' in his earlierworks, and accepted, however unwillingly, the theory he had so often andso deliberately rejected.

The 'Antiquity of Man' came out in February 1863, some three years afterthe 'Origin of Species.' For some time speculation had been active overthe strange hatchets which Boucher de Perthes had recently unearthedamong the Abbeville drift—shapeless masses of chipped flint rudelyfashioned into the form of an axe, which we now call palæolithicimplements, and know to be the handicraft of preglacial men. But untilLyell's authoritative work appeared the unscientific public could nottell exactly what to think of these curious and almost unhuman-lookingobjects. Lyell at once set all doubts at rest; the magic of his namesilenced the derisive whispers of the dissidents. Already, in theprevious year,[Pg 121] the first fasciculus of Colenso's famous work on thePentateuch had dealt a serious blow from the ecclesiastical and criticalside at the authenticity and historical truth of the Mosaic cosmogony.Lyell now from the scientific side completely demolished its literaltruth, as ordinarily interpreted, by throwing back the primitive originof our race into a dim past of immeasurable antiquity. In so doing hewas clearing the way for Charles Darwin's second great work, 'TheDescent of Man;' and by incorporating in his book Huxley's remarks onthe Neanderthal skull, and much similar evolutionary matter, headvertised the new creed in the animal origin of our race with all theacquired weight of his immense and justly-deserved European reputation.As a matter of taste, Lyell did not relish the application ofevolutionism to his own species. But, with that perfect loyalty to factwhich he shared so completely with Charles Darwin, as soon as he foundthe evidence overwhelming, he gave in. By that grudging concession heimmensely strengthened the position of the new creed. 'I plead guilty,'he writes to Sir Joseph Hooker, 'to going farther in my reasoningtowards transmutation than in my sentiments and imagination, and perhapsfor that very reason I shall lead more people on to Darwin and you, thanone who, being born later, like Lubbock, has comparatively little toabandon of old and long-cherished ideas, which constituted the charm tome of the theoretical part of the science in my earlier days.' And toDarwin himself he writes regretfully. 'The descent of man from thebrutes takes away much of the charm from my speculations on the pastrelating to such matters.' This very reluctance[Pg 122] itself told powerfullyin favour of Charles Darwin's novel theories: there is no evidence morevaluable to a cause than that which it extorts by moral force, in spiteof himself, from the faltering lips of an unwilling witness.

The same year that saw the publication of Lyell's 'Antiquity of Man' sawalso the first appearance of Huxley's work on 'Man's Place in Nature.'Darwin himself had been anxious rather than otherwise to avoid too closereference to the implications of his theory as regards the origin anddestiny of the human race. He had desired that his strictly scientificviews on the rise of specific distinctions should be judged entirely ontheir own merits, unhampered by the interference of real or supposedtheological and ethical considerations. His own language on all suchsubjects, wherever he was compelled to trench on them in the 'Origin ofSpecies,' was guarded and conciliatory; he scarcely referred at all toman or his history; and his occasional notices of the moving principleand first cause of the entire cosmos were reverential and religious inthe truest sense and in the highest degree. But you cannot let loose amoral whirlwind, and then attempt to direct its course; you cannot openthe floodgates of opinion or of speculation, and then pretend to setlimits to the scope of their restless motion. Darwin soon found out thatpeople would insist in drawing inferences beyond what was written, andin seeing implicit conclusions when they were not definitely formulatedin the words of their author. 'Man is perennially interesting to man,'says the great chaotic American thinker; and whatever all-embracingtruth you set before him, you may be sure[Pg 123] that man will see in itchiefly the implications that most closely affect his own happiness andhis own destiny. The biological question of the origin of species is asufficiently wide one, but it includes also, among other cases, theorigin of the very familiar speciesHomo sapiens of Linnæus. Sometheologians jumped at once at the conclusion, right or wrong, that ifDarwinism were true man was nothing more than a developed monkey, theimmortal soul was an exploded myth, the foundations of religion itselfwere shattered, and the wave of infidelity was doomed to swamp the wholeof Christendom with its blank nihilism. Scientific men, on the otherhand, drew the conclusion that man must be descended, like othermammals, from some common early vertebrate ancestor, and that thecurrent views of his origin and destiny must be largely modified by theevolutionary creed. Of this profound scientific belief ProfessorHuxley's maiden work was the earliest outcome.

Meantime, on the continent of Europe and over-sea in America, theDarwinian theory was being hotly debated and warmly defended. France,coldly sceptical and critical, positive rather than imaginative inmatters of science, and little prone by native cast of mind to theevolutionary attitude, stood aloof to a great extent from the onwardcourse of the general movement. Here and there, to be sure, a Gaudry ora Ribot, a Delboeuf or a De Candolle (the two latter a Liège Belgian anda Genevan Swiss) might heartily throw himself into the new ideas, andcontribute whole squadrons of geological or botanical fact to the finalvictory. Yet, as a whole, the dry and cautious French intelligence, everinclined[Pg 124] to a scientific opportunism, preferred for the moment to standby expectant and await the result of the European consensus. Butphilosophical Germany, on the other hand, beaming enthusiasm from itsmyriad spectacles, eagerly welcomed the novel ideas, and proclaimed fromthe housetops the evolutionary faith as a main plank in the risingplatform of the newly-roused Kulturkampf. Fritz Müller began with allthe ardour of a fresh convert to collect his admirable 'Facts forDarwin;' his brother Hermann sat down with indomitable patience, likethe master's own, to watch the ceaseless action of the bees andbutterflies in the fertilisation of flowers. Rütimeyer applied theDarwinian principles to the explanation of mammalian relationships, andHaeckel set to work upon his vast reconstructive 'History of Creation,'a largely speculative work which, with all its faults, distinctlycarried forward the evolutionary impulse, and set fresh researchersworking upon new lines, to confirm or to disprove its audaciousimaginings. In America, Asa Gray gave to the young creed the highauthority of his well-known name, and Chauncey Wright helped it onwardon the road with all the restrained force of his singular and obliquebut powerful and original personality. If Agassiz and Dawson stillhesitated, Fiske and Youmans were ardent in the faith. If criticalBoston put up its eye-glass doubtfully, Chicago and St. Louis were readyfor conversion. Everywhere Darwin and Darwinism became as householdwords; it was the singular fate of the great prophet of evolution, alonealmost among the sons of men, to hear his own name familiarly twistedduring his own lifetime into a colloquial adjective, and to see[Pg 125] theDarwinian theory and the errors of Darwinism staring him in the face ahundred times a day from every newspaper and every periodical.

Of course the 'Origin of Species' was largely translated at once intoall the civilised languages of Europe, Russian as well as French, Dutchas well as German, Swedish as well as Italian, Spanish as well asHungarian, nay even, at last, transcending narrow continental limits,Japanese as well as Hindustani. The revolution which it was rapidlyeffecting was indeed a revolution in every mode of thought and feelingas well as a revolution in mere restricted biological opinion. But allthis time, the modest, single-minded, and unassuming author was workingunmoved among his plants and pigeons in his home at Down, regardless ofthe European fame he was so quickly acquiring, and anxious only to bringto a termination the vast work which he still contemplated. A littlemore than eleven years intervened between the publication of the 'Originof Species,' in 1859, and the first appearance of the 'Descent of Man,'in 1871. The interval was occupied in carrying out in part the giganticscheme of his original collections for the full treatment of thedevelopment theory. The work published in 1859 Darwin regarded merely asan abstract and preliminary outline of his full opinions: 'No one canfeel more sensible than I do,' he wrote, 'of the necessity of hereafterpublishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which myconclusions have been grounded.' The marvellously learned work on the'Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,' which came out intwo volumes in 1867, formed the first instalment[Pg 126] of this long-projectedtreatise. The second part, as he told Mr. Fiske, was to have treated ofthe variation of animals and plants through natural selection; while thethird part would have dealt at length with the phenomena of morphology,of classification, and of distribution in space and time. But theselatter portions of the work were never written. To say the truth, theywere never needed. So universal was the recognition among the youngermen of Darwin's discovery, that before ten years were over innumerableworkers were pushing out the consequences of natural selection intoevery field of biology and palæontology. It seemed no longer sonecessary as it had once seemed to write the larger and more elaboratetreatise he had originally contemplated.

The volume on the variation of animals and plants contained alsoDarwin's one solitary contribution to the pure speculative philosophy oflife—his 'Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis,' by which he strove toaccount on philosophical principles for the general facts of physicaland mental heredity. Not to mince matters, it was his one conspicuousfailure, and is now pretty universally admitted as such. Let not thelove of the biographer deceive us; Darwin was here attempting a taskultra vires. As already observed, his mind, vast as it was, leanedrather to the concrete than to the abstract side: he lacked thedistinctively metaphysical and speculative twist. Strange to say, too,his abortive theory appeared some years later than Herbert Spencer'smagnificent all-sided conception of 'Physiological Units,' put forthexpressly to meet the self-same difficulty. But while Darwin'shypothesis is rudely[Pg 127] materialistic, Herbert Spencer's is built up by anacute and subtle analytical perception of all the analogous facts inuniversal nature. It is a singular instance of a crude and essentiallyunphilosophic conception endeavouring to replace a finished and delicatephilosophical idea.

Earlier still, in 1862, Darwin had published his wonderful andfascinating book on the 'Fertilisation of Orchids.' It is delightful tocontemplate the picture of the unruffled naturalist, in the midst ofthat universal storm of ecclesiastical obloquy and scientific enthusiasmwhich he had roused throughout Europe, sitting down calmly in hisKentish conservatory to watch the behaviour of catasetums andmasdevallias, and to work out the details of his chosen subject, withthat marvellous patience of which he was so great a master, in thepettiest minutiæ of fertilisation as displayed by a single highlydeveloped family of plants. Whoever wishes to learn the full profundityof Darwin's researches, into every point that he set himself toinvestigate, cannot do better than turn for a while to the considerationof that exquisite treatise on one of the quaintest fairylands ofscience. He will there learn by what an extraordinary wealth of cunningdevices natural selection has ensured the due conveyance of thefecundating pollen from stamens to stigmas within the limits of a singlegroup of vegetable organisms. Here the fertilising mass is gummedautomatically between the eyes of the exploring bee, and then bent roundby the drying of its stalk so as to come in contact with the stigmaticsurface. There the pollen club is jerked out elastically by a sensitivefibre, and actually[Pg 128] flung by its irritable antennæ at the unconscioushead of the fertilising insect. In one case, the lip of the flowersecretes moisture and forms a sort of cold bath, which wets the wings ofthe bees, so compelling them to creep out of the bucket by a passageclose to the anthers and stigma; in another case, the honey is concealedat the bottom of so long a tube that only the proper fertilising mothwith a proboscis of ten or eleven inches in length can probe the deeprecess in which it is hidden. These, and a hundred other similarinstances, were all carefully considered and described by the greatnaturalist as the by-work with which he filled up one of the intervalsbetween his greater and more comprehensive treatises.

In the decade between 1860 and 1870 the progress of Darwinism was rapidand continuous. One by one, the few scientific men who still held outwere overborne by the weight of evidence. Geology kept supplying freshinstances of transitional forms; the progress of research in unexploredcountries kept adding to our knowledge of existing intermediate speciesand varieties. During those ten years, Herbert Spencer published his'First Principles,' his 'Biology,' and the remodelled form of his'Psychology;' Huxley brought out 'Man's Place in Nature,' the 'Lectureson Comparative Anatomy,' and the 'Introduction to the Classification ofAnimals;' Wallace produced his 'Malay Archipelago' and his'Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection;' and Galton wrote hisadmirable work on 'Hereditary Genius,' of which his own family is soremarkable an instance. Tyndall and Lewes had long since signified theirwarm adhesion. At Oxford,[Pg 129] Rolleston was bringing up a fresh generationof young biologists in the new faith; at Cambridge, Darwin's olduniversity, a whole school of brilliant and accurate physiologists wasbeginning to make itself both felt and heard in the world of science. Inthe domain of anthropology, Tylor was welcoming the assistance of thenew ideas, while Lubbock was engaged on his kindred investigations intothe Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man. All thesediverse lines of thought both showed the wide-spread influence ofDarwin's first great work, and led up to the preparation of his second,in which he dealt with the history and development of the human race.And what was thus true of England was equally true of the civilisedworld, regarded as a whole: everywhere the great evolutionary movementwas well in progress; everywhere the impulse sent forth from that quietKentish home was permeating and quickening the entire pulse ofintelligent humanity.

Why was it that the 'Origin of Species' possessed this extraordinaryvitalising and kinetic power, this germinal energy, this contagiousforce, beyond all other forms of evolutionism previously promulgated?Why did the world, that listened so coldly to Lamarck and Chambers, turnso ready an ear to Charles Darwin and natural selection? Partly, nodoubt, because in the fulness of time the moment had come and theprophet had arisen. All great movements are long brewing, and burst outat last (like the Reformation and the French Revolution) with explosiveenergy. But the cause is largely to be found, also, I believe, in thepeculiar nature of the Darwinian solution. True, a[Pg 130] thoroughly logicalmind, a mind of the very highest order, would have said even beforeDarwin, 'Creation can have no possible place in the physical series ofthings at all. How organisms came to be I do not yet exactly see; but Iam sure they must have come to be by some merely physical process, if wecould only find it out.' And such minds were all actually evolutionaryeven before Darwin had made themodus operandi of evolutionintelligible. But most people are not so clear-sighted. They require tohave everything proved to them by the strictest collocation of actualinstances. They will not believe unless one rise from the dead. Thereare men who rejected the raw doctrine of special creation on evidenceadduced; and there are men who never even for a moment entertained it asconceivable. The former compose the mass of the scientific world, and itwas for their conversion that the Darwinian hypothesis was so highlysalutary. As Professor Fiske rightly remarks, 'The truth is that beforethe publication of the "Origin of Species" there was no opinion whatevercurrent respecting the subject that deserved to be called a scientifichypothesis. That the more complex forms of life must have come intoexistence through some process of development from simpler forms was nodoubt the only sensible and rational view to take of the subject; but ina vague and general opinion of this sort there is nothing that isproperly scientific. A scientific hypothesis must connect the phenomenawith which it deals by alleging a "true cause;" and before 1859 no onehad suggested a "true cause" for the origination of new species,although the problem was one over which every philosophical naturalisthad puzzled since the[Pg 131] beginning of the century. This explains why Mr.Darwin's success was so rapid and complete, and it also explains why hecame so near being anticipated.' To put it briefly,a priori, creationis from the very first unbelievable; but, as a matter of evidence,Lamarck failed to make evolution comprehensible, or to give a rationaleof its mode of action, while Darwin's theory of natural selectionsucceeded in doing so for those who awaiteda posteriori proof. HenceDarwin was able to convert the world, where Lamarck had only been ableto stir up enquiry among the picked spirits of the scientific andphilosophical coterie. Therein lies the true secret of his rapid, hisbrilliant, and his triumphant progress. He had found out not onlythatit was so, buthow it was so, too. In Aristotelian phrase, he haddiscovered theπῶς as well as theὅτι.[Pg 132]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DESCENT OF MAN.

In 1871, nearly twelve years after the 'Origin of Species,' Darwinpublished his 'Descent of Man.'

We have seen already that he would fain have avoided the treatment ofthis difficult and dangerous topic a little longer, so as to let hismain theory be fairly judged on its own merits, without the obtrusion oftheological or personal feelings into so purely biological a question;but the current was too strong for him, and at last he yielded. On theone hand, the adversaries had drawn for themselves the conclusion ofman's purely animal origin, and held it up to ridicule under false formsin the most absurd and odious light. On the other hand, imprudent allieshad put forth under the evolutionary ægis their somewhat hypotheticaland extravagant speculations on this involved subject, which Darwin wasnaturally anxious to correct and modify by his own more sober andguarded inferences. The result was the second great finishing work ofthe complete Darwinian system of things.

Ever since evolutionism had begun to be at all it had been observed thata natural corollary from the doctrine of descent with modification wasthe belief in[Pg 133] man's common ancestry with the anthropoid apes. As earlyas the middle of the last century, indeed, Lord Monboddo, a whimsicalScotch eccentric, had suggested in his famous book on the origin oflanguage the idea that men were merely developed monkeys. But this crudeand unorganised statement of a great truth, being ultimately based uponno distinct physical grounds, deserved scarcely to be classed higherthan the childish evolutionism of 'Telliamed' De Maillet, which makesbirds descend from flying-fish and men the offspring of the hypotheticaltritons. On this point as on most others the earliest definitescientific views are those of Buffon, who ventured to hint with extremecaution the possibility of a common ancestry for man and all othervertebrate animals. Goethe the all-sided had caught a passing glimpse ofthe same profound conception about the date of the Reign of Terror; andErasmus Darwin had openly announced it, though without much elaboration,in his precocious and premature 'Zoonomia.' Still more specifically, ina note to the 'Temple of Nature,' the English evolutionist says: 'It hasbeen supposed by some that mankind were formerly quadrupeds.... Thesephilosophers, with Buffon and Helvetius, seem to imagine that mankindarose from one family of monkeys on the banks of the Mediterranean;' andin the third canto of that fantastic poem, he enlarges upon the greatpart performed by the hand, with its opposable thumb, in the developmentand progress of the human species. Lamarck, in his 'PhilosophieZoologique,' distinctly lays down the doctrine that man is descendedfrom an ape-like ancestor, which gradually acquired the uprightposition, not even now[Pg 134] wholly natural to the human race, and maintainedonly by the most constant watchfulness. The orang-outang was then thehighest known anthropoid ape; and it was from the orang-outang,therefore, that the fancy of Lyell and other objectors in thepre-Darwinian days continually derived the Lamarckian Adam.

The introduction of the chimpanzee into our European Zoological Gardensgave a fresh type of anthropoid to the crude speculators of the middledecades of the century; and in 1859, Paul du Chaillu, the explorer andhunter of the Gaboon country, brought over to America and Europe thefirst specimens of the true gorilla ever seen by civilised men. Therecan be little doubt that the general interest excited by his narrativeof his adventures (published in London in 1861) and by the well-knownstuffed specimen of the huge African anthropoid ape so long conspicuousin the rooms of the British Museum, and now surviving (somewhat theworse for wear) in the natural history collection at South Kensington,did much to kindle public curiosity as to the nature of our relationswith the lower animals. It is no mere accidental circumstance, indeed,that Huxley should have brought out 'Man's Place in Nature' just twoyears after Du Chaillu's 'Explorations and Adventures in EquatorialAfrica' had made the whole world, lay and learned, familiar with thename and features of the most human in outer aspect among the anthropoidfamily. Thenceforth the gorilla, and not the orang-outang, was popularlyhit upon by scoffer and caricaturist as the imaginary type of ourprimitive ancestors.

On the other hand, during the twelve intervening[Pg 135] years immense strideshad been made in every department of anthropological science, and thewhole tenor of modern speculation had been clearing the ground for the'Descent of Man,' In 1865, Rolle in Germany had published his work on'Man Viewed by the Light of the Darwinian Theory.' Two years later,Canestrini in Italy read before the Naturalists' Society of Modena hisinteresting paper on rudimentary characters as bearing on the origin ofthe human species. In 1868, Büchner brought out his rudely materialisticsledge-hammer lectures on the Darwinian principle; and in 1869, Barragoflung straight at the head of the Roman clericals his offensive work onman and the anthropoid apes. Most of these foreign publications wereunhappily marked by that coarse and almost vituperative opposition toreceived views which too often disfigures French and Germancontroversial literature. In England, on the contrary, under our milderand gentler ecclesiastical yoke, the contest had been conducted withgreater decorum and with far better results. Wallace had broken groundtentatively and reverently in his essay on the 'Origin of Human Races,'where he endeavoured to show that man is the co-descendant with theanthropoid apes of some ancient lower and extinct form. Lubbock's'Prehistoric Times' (1865) and 'Origin of Civilisation' (1870) helped toclear the way in the opposite direction by demolishing the old belief,firmly upheld by Whately and others, that savages represent a degradedtype, and that the civilised state is natural and, so to speak,congenital to man. Tylor's 'Early History of Mankind' (1865) did stillmore eminent service in the same direction. Colenso's 'Pentateuch[Pg 136] andBook of Joshua Critically Examined,' the publication of which began in1862, had already shaken the foundations of the Mosaic cosmogony, andincidentally discredited the received view of the direct creation of thefirst human family. McLennan's 'Primitive Marriage' (1865) and HerbertSpencer's articles on the origin of religion had kept speculation alivealong other paths, all tending ultimately towards the same conclusion.Darwin's own cousin, Hensleigh Wedgwood, and Canon Farrar, hadindependently endeavoured to prove that language, instead of being adivine gift, might have arisen in a purely natural manner frominstinctive cries and the imitation of external sounds. The Duke ofArgyll and Professor Max Müller, by the obvious feebleness of theirhalf-hearted replies, had unconsciously aided in disseminating andenforcing the very views they attempted to combat. Bagehot and Flower,Maudsley and Jevons, Vogt and Lindsay, Galton and Brown-Séquard had eachin his way contributed facts and arguments ultimately utilised by thegreat master architect in building up his consistent and harmoniousedifice. Finally, in 1868, Haeckel had published his 'Natural History ofCreation,' in which he discussed with surprising and perhaps excessiveboldness the various stages in the genealogy of man. These variousworks, following so close upon Huxley's 'Man's Place in Nature' andLyell's conclusive 'Antiquity of Man,' left Darwin no choice but to setforth his own reasoned opinions on the subject of the origin anddevelopment of the human species.

The evidence of the descent of man from some lower form, collected andmarshalled together by Darwin, consists[Pg 137] chiefly of minute inferentialproofs which hardly admit of deliberate condensation. In his bodilystructure man is formed on the same underlying type or model as all theother mammals, bone answering throughout to bone, as, for example, inthe fore limb, where homologous parts have been modified in the dog intotoes, in the bat into wing-supports, in the seal into flippers, and inman himself into fingers and thumb, while still retaining in every casetheir essential fundamental likeness of construction. Even the brain ofman resembles closely the brain of the higher monkeys; the differenceswhich separate him in this respect from the orang or the gorilla are farslighter than the differences which separate those apes themselves fromthe inferior monkeys. Indeed, as Huxley conclusively showed, onanatomical grounds alone, man must be classed in the order Primates asonly one among the many divergent forms which that order includes withinits wide limits.

In his embryonic development man closely resembles the lower animals,the human creature being almost indistinguishable in certain stages fromthe dog, the bat, the seal, and especially the monkeys. At a very earlyage he possesses a slight projecting tail; at another, the great toe isshorter than its neighbours, and projects like the thumb at a slightangle; and at a third, the convolutions of the brain reach a point ofdevelopment about equivalent to that of the adult baboon. In his firststages man himself stands far more closely related to the apes than theapes in turn stand to cats or hyænas.

Rudiments of muscles not normally found in man[Pg 138] occur in many aberranthuman individuals. Some people possess the power of moving their scalpsand wagging their ears like dogs and monkeys; others can twitch the skinof their bodies, as horses do when worried by flies. Mr. Woolner, thesculptor, pointed out to Darwin a certain little projecting point orknob on the margin of the ear, observed by him in the course ofmodelling, which comparison shows to be the last folded remnant orrudiment of the once erect and pointed monkey-like ear-tip. Thenictitating membrane, or third eyelid, once more, which in birds can bedrawn so rapidly across the ball of the eye, and which gives thefamiliar glazed or murky appearance, is fairly well developed in theornithorhyncus and the kangaroo, as well as in a few higher mammals,like the walrus; but in man, as in the monkey group, it survives onlyunder the degenerate form of a practically useless rudiment, thesemilunar fold. Man differs from the other Primates in his apparentlyhairless condition; but the hair, though short and downy, still remainson close inspection, and in some races, such as the Ainos of Japan,forms a shaggy coat like an orang's or a gibbon's. A few long roughhairs sometimes project from the short smooth down of the eyebrows; andthese peculiar bristles, occasional only in the human species, arehabitual in the chimpanzee and in many baboons. Internal organs showsimilar rudiments, of less enthralling interest, it must be candidlyconfessed, to the unscientific outside intelligence. Even the bonyskeleton contributes its share of confirmatory evidence; for in thelower monkeys and in many other mammals a certain main trunk nervepasses through a special perforation in the shoulder-blade,[Pg 139] and thisperforation, though now almost obsolete, sometimes recurs in man, inwhich case the nerve in question invariably passes through it, as in theinferior monkeys. What is still more remarkable is the fact that theperforation occurs far more frequently (in proportion) among theskeletons of very ancient races than among those of our own time. Onechief cause why in this and other cases ancient races often presentstructures resembling those of the lower animals seems to be that theystand nearer in the long line of descent to their remote animal-likeprogenitors.

The conclusion at which, after fully examining all the evidence, Darwinfinally arrives is somewhat as follows:

The early ancestors of man must have been more or less monkey-likeanimals, belonging to the great anthropoid group, and related to theprogenitors of the orang-outang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla. Theymust have been once covered with hair, both sexes possessing beards.Their ears were probably pointed and capable of movement, and theirbodies were provided with a movable tail. The foot had a great toesomewhat thumb-like in its action, with which they could grasp thebranches of trees. They were probably arboreal in their habits,fruit-eaters by choice, and inhabitants of some warm forest-clad land.The males had great canine teeth, with which they fought one another forthe possession of the females. At a much earlier period, the internalanatomical peculiarities approached those of the lowest mammals, and theeye was provided with a third eyelid. Peering still further back intothe dim abyss of the ages, Darwin vaguely describes the[Pg 140] ancestors ofhumanity as aquatic animals, allied to the mudfish; for our lungs areknown to consist of modified swim-bladders, which must once have servedour remote progenitors in the office of a float. The gill-clefts on theneck of the human embryo still point to the spot where the branchiæonce, no doubt, existed. Our primordial birthplace appears to have beena shore washed twice a day by the recurrent tides. The heart then tookthe shape merely of a simple pulsating vessel; and a long undividedspinal cord usurped the place of the vertebral column. These extremelyprimitive ancestors of man, thus dimly beheld across the gulf of ages,must have been at least as simply and humbly organised as that verylowest and earliest of existing vertebrates, the worm-like lancelet.

From such a rude and indefinite beginning natural selection, aided bythe various concomitant principles, has slowly built up the pedigree ofman. Starting from these remote half-invertebrate forms, whose vagueshape is still perhaps in part preserved for us by the soft andjelly-like larva of the modern ascidian, we rise by long stages to agroup of early fishes, like the lancelet itself. From these the ganoidsand then the lung-bearing mudfish must have been gradually developed.From such fish a very small advance would carry us on to the newts andother amphibians. The duck-billed platypus helps us slightly to bridgeover the gap between the reptiles and the lower mammals, such as thekangaroo and the wombat, though the connection with the amphibians isstill, as when Darwin wrote, highly problematical. From marsupials, suchas the kangaroo, we ascend gradually to the insectivorous typerepresented by the[Pg 141] shrews and hedgehogs, and thence once more by verywell-marked intermediate stages to the lemurs of Madagascar, a grouplinked on the one hand to the insectivores, and on the other to the truemonkeys. The monkeys, again, 'branched off into two great stems—the NewWorld and Old World monkeys; and from the latter, at a remote period,man, the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded.'

The word was spoken; the secret was out. The world might well have beenexcused for treating it scornfully. But as a matter of fact, the stormwhich followed the 'Descent of Man' was as nothing compared with thetorrent of abuse that had pursued the author of the 'Origin of Species.'In twelve years society had grown slowly accustomed to the oncestartling idea, and it listened now with comparatively languid interestto the final utterance of the great biologist on the question of its ownorigin and destinies. In 1859 it cried in horror, 'How very shocking!'in 1871, it murmured complacently, 'Is that all? Why, everybody knewthat much already!'

Nevertheless, on the moral and social side, the ultimate importance ofthe 'Descent of Man' upon the world's history can hardly be overrated bya philosophic investigator. Vast as was the revolution effected inbiology by the 'Origin of Species,' it was as nothing compared with thestill wider, deeper, and more subtly-working revolution inaugurated bythe announcement of man's purely animal origin. The main discovery,strange to say, affected a single branch of thought alone; the minorcorollary drawn from it to a single species has already affected, and isdestined in the future still[Pg 142] more profoundedly to affect, everypossible sphere of human energy. Not only has it completely reversed ourentire conception of history generally, by teaching us that man hasslowly risen from a very low and humble beginning, but it has alsorevolutionised our whole ideas of our own position and our own destiny,it has permeated the sciences of language and of medicine, it hasintroduced new conceptions of ethics and of religion, and it threatensin the future to produce immense effects upon the theory and practice ofeducation, of politics, and of economic and social science. Thesewide-reaching and deep-seated results began to be felt from the firstmoment when the Darwinian principle was definitely promulgated in the'Origin of Species,' but their final development and general acceptancewas immensely accelerated by Darwin's own authoritative statement in the'Descent of Man.'

To some among us still, as to Lyell before us, this new belief in theanimal origin of man seems far less beautiful, noble, and inspiritingthan the older faith in his special and separate divine creation. Suchthinkers find it somehow more pleasant and comfortable to suppose thatman has fallen than that man has risen; the doctrine of the universaldegradation of humanity paradoxically appears to them more full ofpromise and aspiration for the times to come than the doctrine of itsuniversal elevation. To Darwin himself, however, it seemed otherwise.'Man,' he says, 'may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen,though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organicscale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having beenaboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destinyin[Pg 143] the distant future.' Surely this is the truer and manlier way oflooking at the reversed and improved attitude of man. Surely it isbetter to climb to the top than to have been placed there—andfallen—at the very outset. Surely it is a nobler view of life that wemay yet by our own strenuous exertions raise our race some places higherin the endless and limitless hierarchy of nature than that we are themiserable and hopelessly degenerate descendants of a ruined and degradedangelic progenitor. Surely it is well, while we boast with Glaucus thatwe indeed are far braver and better than our ancestors, to pray at thesame time, in the words of Hector, that our sons may be yet braver andbetter than ourselves.[Pg 144]

CHAPTER IX.

THE THEORY OF COURTSHIP.

In the same volumes with the 'Descent of Man' Darwin included hisadmirable treatise on sexual selection. This form of selection he hadalready dealt with briefly in the 'Origin of Species;' but as in hisopinion it was largely instrumental in producing the minor differenceswhich separate one race of men from another, he found it necessary toenlarge and expand it in connection with his account of the rise andprogress of the human species.

Among many animals, and especially in the higher classes of animals, themales and females do not mate together casually; there is a certainamount of selection or of courtship. In some cases, as with deer andantelopes, the males fight with one another for the possession of thefemales. In other cases, as with the peacock and the humming-birds, themales display their beauty and their skill before the eyes of theassembled females. In the first instance, the victor obtains the mates;in the second instance, the mates themselves select from the group thehandsomest and most personally pleasing competitor. Sexual selection, ofwhich these are special cases, depends on the advantage[Pg 145] possessed bycertain individuals over others of the same sex and species solely inrespect to the question of mating. In all such instances, the males haveacquired their weapons of offence and defence or their ornamentaldecorations, not from being better fitted to survive in the struggle forexistence, but from having gained an advantage over other males of thesame kind, and from having transmitted this advantage to offspring oftheir own sex alone.

Just as man can improve the breed of his game-cocks by the selection ofthose birds which are victorious in the cockpit, so the strongest andmost vigorous males, or those provided with the best weapons, haveprevailed in the state of nature over their feebler and more cowardlycompetitors. Just as man can give beauty, according to his own standardof taste, to his male poultry, by selecting special birds for theirplumage, their port, their wattles, or their hackles, so female birds ina state of nature have by a long-continued choice of the more attractivemales added to their beauty and their ornamental adjuncts. In these twoways, Darwin believed, a limited selection has slowly developed weaponslike the horns of buffaloes, the antlers of stags, the tusks of boars,and the spurs of game-birds, together with the courage, strength, andpugnacity always associated with such special organs. It has alsodeveloped the ornamental plumage of the peacock, the argus pheasant, andthe birds of paradise; the song of the lark, the thrush, and thenightingale; the brilliant hues on the face of the mandrill; and theattractive perfume of the musk-deer, the snakes, and the scentedbutterflies. Wherever one sex possesses[Pg 146] any decorative or alluringadjunct not equally shared by the other, Darwin attributed this specialgift either to the law of battle, or to the long and slowly exertedselective action of their fastidious mates.

The germ of the doctrine of sexual selection is to be found, like somany other of Charles Darwin's theories, in a prophetic passage of hisgrandfather's 'Zoonomia.' Stags, the Lichfield physician tells us, areprovided with antlers 'for the purpose of combating other stags for theexclusive possession of the females, who are observed, like the ladiesin the time of chivalry, to attend the car of the victor. The birdswhich do not carry food to their young, and do not therefore marry, arearmed with spurs for the purpose of fighting for the exclusivepossession of the females, as cocks and quails. It is certain that theseweapons are not provided for their defence against other adversaries,because the females of these species are without this armour. The finalcause of this contest among the males seems to be that the strongest andmost active animal should propagate the species, which should thencebecome improved.'

It must be noticed, however, that Erasmus Darwin here imports into thequestion the metaphysical and teleological notion of the final cause,implying that the struggle of the males was ordained from without, forthis express and preconceived purpose; whereas Charles Darwin, nevertranscending the world of phenomena, more logically regards the struggleitself as an efficient cause, having for its result the survival of thestrongest or the handsomest as the case may be. This distinction isfundamental; it marks the gulf between the essentially teleologicalspirit of the eighteenth century and[Pg 147] the essentially positive spirit ofphilosophy and science at the present day.

Here again, too, the immense logical superiority of Charles Darwin'srigorous and exhaustive inductive method over the loose suggestivenessof his grandfather Erasmus may easily be observed. For while Erasmusmerely throws out a clever and interesting hint as to the supposedmethod and intention of nature, Charles Darwin proves his thesis, pointby point, with almost mathematical exactitude, leaving no objectionunmet behind him, but giving statistical and inductive warrant for everystep in his cumulative argument. He goes carefully into the numericalproportion of the two sexes in various species; into the relative datesof arrival in any particular country of the males and females ofmigratory birds; into the question whether any individuals ever remainin the long run unpaired; into the chances of the earliest-mated or mostvigorous couples leaving behind more numerous or stronger offspring torepresent them in the next generation. He collects from every quarterand from all sources whatever available evidence can be obtained as tothe courtship and rivalry of birds and butterflies, of deer andantelopes, of fish and lizards. He shows by numerous examples andquotations how even flies coquet together in their pretty rhythmicalaerial dances; how wasps battle eagerly with one another to securepossession of their unconcerned mates; how cicadas strive to win their'voiceless brides' with stridulating music; how sphinx-moths endeavourto allure their partners with the musky odour of their pencilled wings;and how emperors and orange-tips display their gorgeous spots[Pg 148] and bandsin the broad sunshine before the admiring and attentive eyes of theirobservant dames. He traces up the same spirit of rivalry and ostentationto the cock-pheasant strutting about before the attendant hen, and tothe meeting-places of the blackcock, where all the males of the districtfight with one another and undertake long love-dances in regulartournaments, while the females stand by and watch the chances andchanges of the contest with affected indifference. Finally, he pointsout how similar effects are produced by like causes among the higheranimals, especially among our near relations the monkeys; and then heproceeds to apply the principles thus firmly grounded to the particularinstance of the human race itself, the primary object of his entiretreatise.

Some of the most interesting of the modifications due to this particularform of selective action are to be found amongst the insects and otherlow types of animal life. The crickets, the locusts, and thegrasshoppers, for example, are all famous for their musical powers; butthe sounds themselves are produced in the different families by verydifferent and quaintly varied organs. The song of the crickets is evokedby the scraping of minute teeth on the under side of either wing-cover;in the case of the locusts, the left wing, which acts as a bow, overliesthe right wing, which serves as a fiddle; while with the grasshoppers,the leg does duty as the musical instrument, and has a row oflancet-shaped elastic knobs along its outer surface, which the insectrubs across the nerves of the wing-covers when it wishes to charm theears and rouse the affection of its silent mate. In a South Africanspecies of the same family,[Pg 149] the whole body of the male is fairlyconverted into a musical instrument, being immensely inflated, hollow,and distended like a pellucid air-bladder in order to act as anefficient sounding-board. Among the beetles, taste seems generally tohave specialised itself rather on form than on music or colour, and themales are here usually remarkable for their singular and verycomplicated horns, often compared in various species to those of stagsor rhinoceroses, and entirely absent in the females of most kinds. Butit is among the butterflies and moths that insect æstheticism hasproduced its greatest artistic triumphs; for here the beautifuleye-spots and delicate markings on the expanded wing-membranes arealmost certainly due to sexual selection.

The higher animals display like evidence of the same slow selectiveaction. The courtship of the stickleback, who dances 'mad with delight'around the mate he has allured into the nest he prepares for her, hasbeen observed by dozens of observers both before and since in thedomestic aquarium. The gem-like colours of the male dragonet, thebutterfly wings of certain gurnards, and the decorated tails of someexotic carps all point in the same direction. Our own larger newt isadorned during the breeding season with a serrated crest edged withorange; while in the smaller kind the colours of the body acquire at thesame critical period of love-making a vivid brilliancy. The strangehorns and luridly coloured throat-pouches of tropical lizards arefamiliar to all visitors in equatorial climates, and they are confinedexclusively to the male sex. Among birds, the superior beauty of themale plumage is known to everybody; and their greatest glory invariablycoincides[Pg 150] with the special season for the selection of mates. In thespring, as even our poets have told us, the wanton lapwing gets himselfanother crest. The law of battle produces the spur of the game-birds andthe still stranger wing-spurs of certain species of the plover kind.Æsthetic rivalry is answerable rather for vocal music, and for theplumage of the umbrella-bird, the lyre-bird, the humming-birds, and thecock of the rocks. Among mammals, strength rather than beauty seems tohave carried the day; horns, and tusks, and spikes, and antlers are herethe special guerdon of the victorious males. Yet even mammals showoccasional signs of distinctly æsthetic and artistic preferences, as inthe gracefully twisted horns of the koodoo, the scent-glands of themusk-deer or of certain antelopes, the brilliant hues of the malemandrill, and the tufts and moustaches of so many monkeys.

It must be frankly conceded that the reception accorded to Darwin'sdoctrine of sexual selection, even among the biological public, was farless unanimous, enthusiastic, and full than that which had been grantedto his more extensive theory of survival of the fittest. Many eminentnaturalists declined from the very outset to accept the conclusions thusdefinitely set before them, and others who at first seemed disposed tobow to the immense weight of Darwin's supreme authority graduallywithdrew their grudging assent from the new doctrine, as they foundtheir relapse backed up by others, and refused to believe that thetheory of courtship had been fairly proven before the final tribunal ofscience. Several critics began by objecting that the whole theory was amere afterthought. Darwin, they said, finding that[Pg 151] natural selectiondid not suffice by itself to explain all the details of structure inman, had invented sexual selection as a supplementary principle to helpit over the hard places. Those who wrote and spoke in this thoughtlessfashion could have had but a very inadequate idea of Darwin's closeexperimental methods of enquiry. As a matter of fact, indeed, they wereentirely wrong; the doctrine of sexual selection itself, already faintlyforeshadowed by Erasmus Darwin in the 'Zoonomia,' had been distinctlydeveloped in the first edition of the 'Origin of Species' with at leastas much provisional elaboration as any other equally important factor inthe biological drama as set forth in that confessedly introductory work.Nay, Haeckel had caught gladly at the luminous conception thereexpressed, even before the appearance of the 'Descent of Man,' and hadworked it out in his 'Generelle Morphologie,' with great insight, to itslegitimate conclusions in many directions. Indeed, the sole reason whyso much space was devoted to the subject in Darwin's work on humandevelopment was simply because there for the first time an opportunityarose of utilising his vast store of collected information on thissingle aspect of the evolutionary process. It was no afterthought, but anecessary and inevitable component element of the fully-developedevolutionary concept.

Still, it cannot be denied that naturalists generally did not acceptwith effusion the new clause in the evolutionary creed. Many of themhesitated; a few acquiesced; the majority more or less openly dissented.But Darwin's belief remained firm as a rock. 'I am glad you defendsexual selection,' he wrote a few years later in a private letter; 'Ihave no fear about its ultimate[Pg 152] fate, though it is now at a discount;'and in the preface to the second edition of the 'Descent of Man,' heremarks acutely, 'I have been struck with the likeness of many of thehalf-favourable criticisms on sexual selection with those which appearedat first on natural selection; such as that it would explain some fewdetails, but certainly was not applicable to the extent to which I haveemployed it. My conviction of the power of sexual selection remainsunshaken.... When naturalists have become familiar with the idea, itwill, as I believe, be much more largely accepted; and it has alreadybeen fully and favourably received by several capable judges.'

In spite of the still continued demurrer of not a few among the leadingevolutionists, it is probable, I think, that Darwin's prophecy on thismatter will yet be justified by the verdict of time. For the oppositionto the doctrine of sexual selection proceeds almost invariably, as itseems to me, from those persons who still desire to erect an efficientbarrier of one sort or another between the human and animal worlds;while on the contrary the theory in question is almost if not quiteuniversally accepted by just those rigorously evolutionary biologistswho are freest from preconceptions or speciala priori teleologicalobjections of any kind whatever. The half of the doctrine which dealswith the law of battle, indeed, can hardly be doubted by any competentnaturalist; the other half, which deals with the supposed æstheticpreferences of the females, is, no doubt, distasteful to certainthinkers because it seems to imply the existence in the lower animals ofa sense of beauty which many among us are not even now preparedgenerously[Pg 153] to admit. The desire to arrogate to mankind alone all thehigher faculties either of sense or intellect has probably much to dowith the current disinclination towards the Darwinian idea of sexualselection. Thinkers who allow themselves to be emotionally swayed bysuch extraneous considerations forget that the beautiful is merely thatwhich pleases; that beauty has no external objective existence; and thatthe range of taste, both among ourselves and among animals at large, ispractically infinite. The greatest blow ever aimed at the Darwiniantheory of sexual selection was undoubtedly that dealt out by Mr. AlfredRussel Wallace (et tu, Brute!) in his able and subtle article on theColours of Animals in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' since reprinted in hisdelightful work on 'Tropical Nature.' Wallace there urges with his usualacuteness, ingenuity, and skill several fundamental objections to theDarwinian hypothesis of no little importance and weight. But it mustalways be remembered (with all due respect to the joint discoverer ofnatural selection) that Mr. Wallace himself, after publishing his ownadmirable essay on the development of man, drew back aghast in the endfrom the full consequences of his own admission, and uttered his partialrecantation in the singular words, 'Natural selection could only haveendowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape.' Itseems probable that in every case an analogous desire to erect a firmbarrier between man and brute by positing the faculty for perceivingbeauty as a special quasi-divine differentia of the human race has beenat the bottom of the still faintly surviving dislike amongst a sectionof scientific men to sexual selection.[Pg 154] Nevertheless, a candid andimpartial critic would be compelled frankly to admit that Darwin'sadmirable theory of courtship has not on the whole proved so generallyacceptable to the biological world up to the present time as his greaterand far more comprehensive theory of survival of the fittest. It stillwaits for its final recognition, towards which it is progressing morerapidly and surely every day it lives.[Pg 155]

CHAPTER X.

VICTORY AND REST.

The last eleven years of Darwin's life were spent in enforcing anddeveloping the principles already reached, and in enjoying the almostunchequered progress of the revolution he had so unconsciously tohimself succeeded in inaugurating.

Only one year elapsed between the publication of the 'Descent of Man'and that of its next important successor, the 'Expression of theEmotions.' The occasion of this learned and bulky treatise in itselfstands as an immortal proof of the conscientious way in which Darwinwent to work to anticipate the slightest and most comparativelyimpertinent possible objections to his main theories. Sir Charles Bell,in one of the quaintly antiquated Bridgwater treatises—those marvellousmonuments of sadly misplaced teleological ingenuity—had maintained thatman was endowed with sundry small facial muscles solely for the sake ofexpressing his emotions. This view was so obviously opposed to thebelief in the descent of man from some lower form, 'that,' says Darwin,'it was necessary for me to consider it;' and so he did, in a lengthywork, where the whole subject is exhaustively treated, and[Pg 156] Bell's ideais completely pulverised by the apt allegation of analogous expressionsin the animal world. In his old age Darwin grew, in fact, only the moreceaselessly and wonderfully industrious. In 1875, after three years ofcomparative silence, came the 'Insectivorous Plants,' a work full ofminute observation on the habits and manners of the sundew, thebutterwort, the Venus's fly-catcher, and the various heterogeneousbog-haunting species known by the common name of pitcher plants. Thebare mass and weight of the facts which Darwin had collected for the'Origin of Species' might well-nigh have stifled the very existence ofthat marvellous book: it was lucky that the premature publication ofWallace's paper compelled him to hurry on his 'brief abstract,' for ifhe had waited to select and arrange the whole series of observationsthat he finally published in his various later justificatory volumes, wemight have looked in vain for the great systematic and organising work,which would no doubt have been 'surcharged with its own weight, andstrangled with its waste fertility.' But the task that he himself bestloved was to watch in minute detail the principles whose secret he hadpenetrated, and whose reserve he had broken, working themselves outbefore his very eyes, naked and not ashamed—to catch Actæon-like theundraped form of nature herself in the actual process of her inmostbeing. He could patiently observe the red and slimy hair-glands of thedrosera closing slowly and remorselessly round the insect prey, andsucking from their bodies with sensitive tentacles the protoplasmicjuices denied to its leaves by the poor and boggy soil, on which aloneits scanty rootlets can[Pg 157] properly thrive. He could watch the butterwortcurving round the edges of its wan green foliage upon the captured limbsof fly or aphis. He could note how the serried mass of finger-likeprocesses in the utricles of the bladderwort slowly absorb organicmatter from the larva of a gnat, or the minute water-insects entangledwithin its living and almost animated lobster-pot. He could track thelong line of treacherous honey-glands by which the sarracenia enticesflies into the festering manure-wells of its sticky pitchers. Theminuteness and skill of all his observations on these lesser problems ofnatural selection inevitably inspired faith among outsiders in thecautious judgment of the observer and experimenter; and day by daythroughout his later years the evidence of the popular acceptance of hisdoctrine, and of the dying away of the general ridicule with which itwas first received by the unlearned public, was very gratifying to thegreat naturalist.

A year later, in 1876, came the 'Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisationin the Vegetable Kingdom.' So far as regarded the world of plants,especially with respect to its higher divisions, this work was ofimmense theoretical importance; and it also cast a wonderful side-lightupon the nature of that strange distinction of sex which occurs both inthe vegetable and animal kingdom, and in each is the concomitant—onemight almost say the necessary concomitant—of high development andcomplex organisation. The great result attained by Darwin in his longand toilsome series of experiments on this interesting subject was thesplendid proof of the law that cross-fertilisation produces finer andhealthier offspring, while continuous self-fertilisation[Pg 158] tends in thelong run to degradation, degeneration, and final extinction.

Here as elsewhere, however, Darwin's principle does not springspontaneous, like Athene from the head of Zeus, a goddess full-formed,uncaused, inexplicable: it arises gradually by a slow process ofdevelopment and modification from the previous investigations of earlierbiologists. At the close of the last century, in the terrible year ofupheaval 1793, a quiet German botanist, Christian Konrad Sprengel byname, published at Berlin his long unheeded but intensely interestingwork on the 'Fertilisation of Flowers.' In the summer of 1789, while allEurope was ablaze with the news that the Bastille had been stormed, anda new era of humanity begun, the calm and peaceful Pomeranian observerwas noting in his own garden the curious fact that many flowers areincapable of being fertilised without the assistance of flying insects,which carry pollen from the stamens of one blossom to the sensitivesurface or ovary of the next. Hence he concluded that the secretion ofhoney or nectar in flowers, the contrivances by which it is protectedfrom rain, the bright hues or lines of the corolla, and the sweetperfume distilled by the blossoms, are all so many cunning devices ofnature to ensure fertilisation by the insect-visitors. Moreover,Sprengel observed that many flowers are of one sex only, and that inseveral others the sexes do not mature simultaneously; 'so that,' saidhe, 'nature seems to intend that no flower shall be fertilised by meansof its own pollen.' Indeed, in some instances, as he showed byexperiments upon the yellow day lily, plants impregnated from their ownstamens cannot be made to set[Pg 159] seed at all. 'So near,' says his ablesuccessor, Hermann Müller, 'was Sprengel to the distinct recognition ofthe fact that self-fertilisation leads to worse results thancross-fertilisation, and that all the arrangements which favourinsect-visits are of value to the plant itself, simply because theinsect-visitors effect cross-fertilisation!' As in most otheranticipatory cases, however, it must be here remarked that Sprengel'sidea was wholly teleological: he conceived of nature as animated by adirect informing principle, which deliberately aimed at a particularresult; whereas Darwin rather came to the conclusion thatcross-fertilisation as a matter of fact does actually produce beneficialresults, and that therefore those plants which varied most in thedirection of arrangements for favouring insect-visits were likely to beexceptionally fortunate in the struggle for existence againstcompetitors otherwise arranged. It is just the usual Darwiniansubstitution of an efficient for a final cause.

Even before Sprengel, Kölreuter had recognised, in 1761, thatself-fertilisation was avoided in nature; and his observations andexperiments on intercrossing and on hybridism were largely relied uponby Darwin himself, to whom they suggested at an early period manyfruitful lines of original investigation. In 1799, again, Andrew Knight,following up the same line of thought in England as Sprengel in Germany,declared as the result of his close experiments upon the garden pea,that no plant ever fertilises itself for a perpetuity of generations.But Knight's law, not being brought into causal connection with anygreat fundamental principle of nature, was almost entirely overlooked bythe[Pg 160] scientific world until the publication of Darwin's 'Origin ofSpecies,' half a century later. The same neglect also overtookSprengel's immensely interesting and curious work on fertilisation offlowers. The world, in fact, was not yet ready for the separatetreatment of functional problems connected with the interrelations oforganic beings; so Knight and Sprengel were laid aside unnoticed on thedusty top bookshelves of public libraries, while the dry classificatoryand systematic biology of the moment had it ail its own way for the timebeing on the centre reading-tables. So many separate and independentstrands of thought does it ultimately require to make up the grand finalgeneralisation which the outer world attributes in its totality to theone supreme organising intelligence.

But in the 'Origin of Species' itself Darwin reiterated and emphasisedKnight's law as a general and all-pervading principle of nature, placingit at the same time on broader and surer biological foundations byaffiliating it intimately upon his own great illuminating and unifyingdoctrine of natural selection. He also soon after rescued from oblivionSprengel's curious and fairy-like book, showing in full detail in hiswork on orchids the wonderful contrivances by which flowers seek toattract and to secure the assistance of insects for the impregnation oftheir embryo seeds. In the 'Variation of Animals and Plants underDomestication,' he further showed that breeding in-and-in diminishes thestrength and productiveness of the offspring; while crossing withanother stock produces, on the contrary, the best possible physicalresults in both directions. And now at last, in the 'Effects of[Pg 161] Crossand Self fertilisation,' he proved by careful and frequently repeatedexperiments that a constant infusion of fresh blood (so to speak) isessential to the production of the healthiest offspring. In the words ofhis own emphatic summing up, 'Nature abhors perpetualself-fertilisation.'

The immediate result of these new statements and this fresh rationale ofKnight's law was to bring down Sprengel forthwith from the top shelf,where he had languished ingloriously for seventy years, and to set awhole school of ardent botanical observers working hard in the lines hehad laid down upon the mutual correlations of insects and flowers. Avast literature sprang up at once upon this enchanting andlong-neglected subject, the most eminent workers in the rediscoveredfield being Delpino in Italy, Hildebrand and Hermann Müller in Germany,Axel in Sweden, Lubbock in England, and Fritz Müller in tropical SouthAmerica. Darwin found the question, in fact, almost taken out of hishands before he had time himself to treat of it; for Hildebrand's chiefwork was published as early as 1867, while Axel's appeared in 1869, bothof them several years earlier than Darwin's own final essay on thesubject in the 'Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation.' No statement,perhaps, could more clearly mark the enormous impetus given toresearches in this direction than the fact that D'Arcy Thompson, in hisappendix to Müller's splendid work on the 'Fertilisation of Flowers,'has collected a list of no less than eight hundred and fourteen separateworks or important papers bearing on that special department of botany,almost all of them subsequent in date to the first publication[Pg 162] of the'Origin of Species.' So widely did the Darwinian wave extend, and soprofoundly did it affect every minute point of biological andpsychological investigation.

Each of these later works of Darwin's consists, as a rule, of anexpansion of some single chapter or paragraph in the 'Origin ofSpecies;' or, to speak more correctly, of an arrangement of thematerials collected and the experiments designed for that particularportion of the great projected encyclopædia of evolutionism, of whichthe 'Origin of Species' itself was but a brief anticipatory summary orrough outline. Thus, the book on Orchids, published in 1862, is alreadyforeshadowed in a part of the chapter on the Difficulties of the Theoryof Natural Selection; the 'Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants'(1865) is briefly summarised by anticipation in the long section onModes of Transition; the 'Variation of Animals and Plants underDomestication' (1868) consists of the vast array ofpiècesjustificatives for the first chapter of the 'Origin of Species;' andthe germ of the 'Cross and Self Fertilisation' (1876) is to be seen inthe passage 'On the Intercrossing of Individuals' in Chapter IV. of thesame work. It was well indeed that Darwin began by publishing theshorter and more manageable abstract; the half, as the wise Greekproverb shrewdly remarks, is often more than the whole; and a world thateagerly devoured the first great deliverance of the Darwinian principle,might have stood aghast had it been asked to swallow it piecemeal insuch gigantic treatises as those with which its author afterwards soughtthrice to vanquish all his foes and thrice to slay the slain.[Pg 163]

Yet, with each fresh manifestation of Darwin's inexhaustible resources,on the other hand, the opposition to his principles grew feebler andfeebler, and the universality of their acceptance more and morepronounced, till at last, among biologists at least, not to be aDarwinian was equivalent to being hopelessly left behind by the generalonward movement of the time. In 1874 Tyndall delivered his famousaddress at the Belfast meeting of the British Association; and in 1877,from the same presidential chair at Plymouth, Allen Thomson, longreputed a doubtful waverer, enforced his cordial adhesion to theDarwinian principles by his inaugural discourse on 'The Development ofthe Forms of Animal Life.' A new generation of active workers, trainedup from the first in the evolutionary school, like Romanes, RayLankester, Thistleton Dyer, Balfour, Sully, and Moggridge, had now risengradually around the great master; and in every direction he could seethe seed he had himself planted being watered and nourished in freshsoil by a hundred ardent and enthusiastic young disciples. Even inFrance, ever irresponsive to the touch of new ideas of alien origin,Colonel Moulinié's admirable and sympathetic translations were beginningto win over to the evolutionary creed many rising workers; while inGermany, Victor Carus's excellent versions had from the very firstbrought in the enthusiastic Teutonic biologists with a congenial'swarmery' to the camp of the Darwinians. Correspondents from every partof the world kept pressing fresh facts and fresh applications upon thefounder of the faith; and Darwin saw his own work so fast being takenout of his hands by specialist disciples that he[Pg 164] abandoned entirely hisoriginal intention of publishing in detail the basis of his first book,and contented himself instead with tracing out minutely some minorportions of his contemplated task as specimens of evolutionary method.

In 1877, in pursuance of this changed purpose, Darwin published his bookon 'Forms of Flowers,' in which he dealt closely with the old problem ofdifferently shaped blossoms on plants of the same species. It had longbeen known, to take a single example, that primroses existed in twoforms, the pin-eyed and the thrum-eyed, of which the former has thepin-like summit of the pistil at the top of the tube, and the stamensconcealed half way down its throat; while in the latter these relativepositions are exactly reversed, the stamens answering in place to thepistil of the alternative form with geometrical accuracy. As early as1862 Darwin had shown, in the 'Journal of the Linnean Society,' thatthis curious arrangement owed its development to the greater securitywhich it afforded for cross-fertilisation, because in this way eachflower had to be impregnated with the pollen, from a totally distinctblossom, growing on a different individual plant. In a series ofsuccessive papers read before the same Society in the years between 1863and 1868, he had extended a similar course of explanation to themultiform flowers of the flaxes, the loosestrifes, the featherfoil, theauricula, the buckbean, and several other well-known plants. At last, in1877, he gathered together into one of the now familiar green-coveredvolumes the whole of his observations on this strange peculiarity, andproved by abundant illustration and[Pg 165] experiment that the diversity ofform is always due through natural selection to the advantage gained byperfect security of cross-fertilisation, resulting as it invariably doesin the production of the finest, strongest, and most successfulseedlings. Any variation, however peculiar, which helps to ensure thisconstant infusion of fresh blood is certain to be favoured in thestruggle for life, owing to the superior vitality of the stock itbegets. But it is worthy of notice, as showing the extreme minutenessand exhaustiveness of Darwin's method on the small scale, side by sidewith his extraordinary and unusual power of rising to the very highestand grandest generalisations, that the volume which he devoted to theelucidation of this minor factor in the question of hereditaryadvantages runs to nearly as many pages as the last edition of the'Origin of Species' itself. So great was the wealth of observation andexperiment which he could lavish upon the solution of a single, small,incidental problem.

Even fuller in minute original research was the work which Darwinpublished in 1880, on 'The Power of Movement in Plants,' detailing theresult of innumerable observations on the seemingly irresponsible yetalmost purposive rotations of the growing rootlets and young stems ofpeas and climbers. Anyone who wishes to see on what a wide foundation ofirrefragable fact the great biologist built up the stately fabric of hisvast theories cannot do better than turn for instruction to thisremarkable volume, which the old naturalist gave to the world some timeafter passing the allotted span of threescore years and ten.

It was in the same year (1880) that Huxley delivered[Pg 166] at the RoyalInstitution his famous address on the Coming of Age of the 'Origin ofSpecies.' The time was a favourable one for reviewing the silent andalmost unobserved progress of a great revolution. Twenty-one years hadcome and gone since the father of modern scientific evolutionism hadlaunched upon the world his tentative work. In those twenty-one yearsthe thought of humanity had been twisted around as upon some invisiblepivot, and a new heaven and a new earth had been presented to the eyesof seers and thinkers. One-and-twenty years before, despite theinfluence of Hutton and of Lyell, the dominant view of the earth's pasthistory revealed but one vast and lawless succession of hideouscatastrophes. Wholesale creations and wholesale extinctions, world-widecataclysms followed by fresh world-wide births of interwoven faunas andfloras—these, said Huxley, were the ordinary machinery of thegeological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of themighty Cuvier. One-and-twenty years after, the opponents themselves hadgiven up the game in its fullest form as lost beyond the hope ofpossible restitution. Some hesitating thinkers, it is true, whileaccepting the evolutionary doctrine more or less in its earlier form,like Mivart and Meehan, yet refused their assent on one ground oranother to the specific Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. Others,like Wallace, made a special exception with regard to the development ofthe human species, which they supposed to be due to other causes fromthose implied in the remainder of the organic scale. Yet on the whole,biological science had fairly carried the day in favour of evolution, inone form or another, and not even the cavillers dared now to suggest[Pg 167]that whole systems of creation had been swept awayen bloc, and remadeagain in different forms for a succeeding epoch, in accordance with thebelief which was almost universal among geologists up to the exactmoment of the publication of Darwin's masterpiece.

During the twenty-one years, too, as Huxley likewise pointed out, animmense number of new facts had come to strengthen the hands of theevolutionists at the very point where they had before felt themselvesmost openly vulnerable. Palæontology had supplied many of those missinglinks in the organic chain whose absence from the interrupted andimperfect geological record had been loudly alleged against theDarwinian hypothesis in the earlier days of struggle and hesitation. Twoyears after the publication of the 'Origin of Species,' the discovery ofa winged and feathered creature, happily preserved for us in theSolenhofen slates, with lizard-like head and teeth and tail, andbird-like pinions, feet, and breast, had bridged over in part the greatgap that yawns between the existing birds and reptiles. A few yearslater, new fossil reptilian forms, erect on their hind legs likekangaroos, and with very singular peculiarities of bony structure, hadhelped still further to show the nature of the modifications by whichthe scale-bearing quadruped type passed slowly into that of thefeather-bearing biped. In 1875, again, Professor Marsh's discovery ofthe toothed birds in the American cretaceous strata completed theillustrative series of transitional forms over what had once been themost remarkable existing break in the continuity of organic development.Similarly, Hofmeister's investigations in the vegetable world[Pg 168] broughtclose together the flowering and flowerless plants, by indicating thatthe ferns and the horsetails were connected in curious unforeseen ways,through the pill-worts and club-mosses, with the earliest and simplestof forest trees, the firs and the puzzle-monkeys. In minor matters likeprogress was continually reported on every side. Gaudry found among thefossils of Attica the successive stages by which the ancient andundeveloped civets passed into the more modern and specialised tribe ofthe hyænas; Marsh traced out in Western America the ancestry of thehorse from a five-toed creature no bigger than a fox, throughintermediate four-toed and three-toed forms, to the existing singlesolid-hoofed type with its digits reduced to the minimum of unity; andFilhol unearthed among the phosphorites of Quercy the common progenitorof the most distinct among the recent carnivores, the cats and the dogs,the plantigrade bears and the digitigrade pumas. 'So far as the animalworld is concerned,' Professor Huxley said in conclusion, reviewingthese additions to the evidence upon that memorable occasion, 'evolutionis no longer a speculation but a statement of historical fact.' OfDarwin himself he remarked truly, 'He has lived long enough to outlastdetraction and opposition, and to see the stone that the buildersrejected become the head-stone of the corner.'

It was in 1881 that Darwin published his last volume, 'The Formation ofVegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.' In this singularlyfascinating and interesting monograph he took in hand one of thelowliest and humblest of living forms, the common earthworm, and by anexhaustive study of its habits[Pg 169] and manners strove to show how theentire existence of vegetable mould—the ordinary covering of fertilesoil upon the face of the earth—is due to the long but unobtrusiveaction of these little-noticed and ever-active architects. By the acidswhich they evolve, they appear to aid largely in the disintegration ofthe stone beneath the surface; by their constant practice of eatingfallen leaves, which they drag down with them into their subterraneanburrows, they produce the fine castings of soft earth, so familiar toeverybody, and thus reinstate the coating of humus above the bare rockas often as it is washed away again in the course of ordinary denudationby the rain and the torrents. It is true that subsequent investigationhas shown the possibility of vegetable mould existing under certainconditions without the intervention of worms to any marked extent; but,as a whole, there can be little doubt that over most parts of the worldthe presence of soil, and therefore of the vegetable growth rooted init, is entirely due to the unsuspected yet ceaseless activity of thesehumble creatures.

The germ of the earthworm theory appears to me to have been firstsuggested to Darwin's mind by a passage in a work where one would littlehave suspected it—White's 'Natural History of Selborne.' 'Earthworms,'says the idyllic Hampshire naturalist, 'though in appearance a small anddespicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make alamentable chasm. For to say nothing of half the birds, and somequadrupeds, which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem tobe the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamelywithout them, by boring, perforating, and loosening the soil, andrendering[Pg 170] it pervious to rains and the fibres of plants, by drawingstraws and stalks of leaves into it; and, most of all, by throwing upsuch infinite numbers of lumps of earth, called worm-casts, which, beingtheir excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass. Worms probablyprovide new soils for hills and slopes where the rain washes the earthaway; and they affect slopes, probably, to avoid being flooded.Gardeners and farmers express their detestation of worms; the former,because they render their walks unsightly, and make them much work; andthe latter, because, as they think, worms eat their green corn. Butthese men would find, that the earth without worms would soon becomecold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and, consequently, sterile.'

If Darwin ever read this interesting passage, which he almost certainlymust at some time have done, it would appear that he had overlooked itin later life; for he, who was habitually so candid and careful in theacknowledgment of all his obligations, however great or however small,does not make any mention of it at all in his 'Vegetable Mould,' thoughhe alludes incidentally to some other observations of Gilbert White's onthe minor habits and manners of earthworms. But whether Darwin wasoriginally indebted to White or not for the foundation of his theory onthe subject of mould, the important point to notice is really this, thatwhat with the observant parson of Selborne was but a casual glimpse, themere passing suggestion of a fruitful idea, became with Darwin, in hiswider fashion, a carefully elaborated and powerfully buttressed theory,supported by long and patient investigation, ample[Pg 171] experiment, and vastcollections of minute facts. The difference is strikingly characteristicof the strong point of Darwin's genius. While he had all the breadth anduniversality of the profoundest thinkers, he had also all the marvellousand inexhaustible patience of the most precise and special microscopicalstudent.

For years, indeed, Darwin studied the ways and instincts of the commonearthworm with the same close and accurate observation which he gave toevery other abstruse subject that engaged in any way his acuteintellect. The lawyer's maxim, 'De minimis lex non curat,' he used tosay, never truly applies to science. As early as the year 1837 he read apaper, before the Geological Society of London, 'On the Formation ofMould,' in which he developed with some fulness the mother idea of hiscomplete theory on the earthworm question. He there showed that layersof cinders, marl, or ashes, which had been strewn thickly over thesurface of meadows, were found a few years after at a depth of someinches beneath the turf, yet still forming in spite of their burial aregular and fairly horizontal stratum. This apparent sinking of thestones, he believed, was due to the quantity of fine earth brought up tothe surface by worms in the form of castings. It was objected to histheory at the time that the work supposed to be accomplished by theworms was out of all reasonable proportion to the size and numbers ofthe alleged actors. Here Darwin's foot was on his native heath; he felthimself immediately on solid ground again. The cumulative importance ofseparately infinitesimal elements is indeed the very keynote and specialpeculiarity of the great biologist's method of thinking. He[Pg 172] had foundout in very truth that many a little makes a mickle, that the infinitelysmall, infinitely repeated, may become in process of infinite yearsinfinitely important. So he set himself to work, with characteristiccontempt of time, to weigh and measure worms and worm-castings.

He began by keeping tame earthworms in flower-pots in his own house,counting the number of worms and burrows in certain measured spaces ofpasture or garden, and starting his long and slow experiment in hisfield at Down already alluded to. He tried issues on their senses, ontheir instincts, on their emotions, on their intelligence; he watchedthem darting wildly like rabbits into their holes when alarmed fromwithout, overcoming engineering difficulties in dragging downoddly-shaped or unfamiliar leaves, and protecting the open mouths oftheir tunnels from intruders with a little defensive military glacis ofrounded pebbles. He found that more than 53,000 worms on an averageinhabit every acre of garden land, and that a single casting sometimesweighs as much as three ounces avoirdupois. Ten tons of soil per acrepass annually through their bodies, and mould is thrown up by them at anaverage rate of 22 inches in a century. Careful observations on thestones of Stonehenge; on the tiled floors of buried buildings; on Romanruins at Silchester and Wroxeter, and on his own meadows and pastures atDown, finally enabled the cautious experimenter to prove conclusivelythe truth of his thesis, and to present to the world the despisedearthworm in a new character, as the friend of man and of agriculture,the producer and maintainer of the vegetable mould on our hills or[Pg 173]valleys, and the prime cause of the very existence of that cloak ofgreensward that clothes our lawns, our fields, and our pleasure-grounds.

It was his last work. Persistent ill-health and equally persistent studyfor seventy-three years had broken down a constitution never reallystrong, and consumed from within by the ceaseless fires of its ownoverpowering and undying energy. On Tuesday, April the 18th, 1882, hewas seized at midnight by violent pains, and at four o'clock onWednesday afternoon he died suddenly in his son's arms, after a veryshort but painful illness. So retired was the family life at Down thatthe news of the great biologist's death was not actually known in Londonitself till two days after he had breathed his last.

The universal regret and grief expressed at the loss in all civilisedcountries was the best measure of the immense change of front which hadslowly come over the whole educated community, in the twenty-three yearssince the first publication of the 'Origin of Species.' No sooner wasDarwin's death announced than all lands and all classes vied with oneanother in their eagerness to honour the name and memory of the greatbiologist. Indeed, the spontaneous and immediate nature of the outburstof regret and affectionate regard which followed hard upon the news ofDarwin's death, astonished even those who had watched closely theextraordinary revolution the man himself had brought so well to itsfinal consummation. In England, it was felt instinctively on every sidethat the great naturalist's proper place was in the aisles ofWestminster, hard by the tomb of Newton, his immortal predecessor. To[Pg 174]this universal and deep-seated feeling Darwin's family regretfullysacrificed their own natural preference for a quiet interment in thegraveyard at Down. On the Wednesday morning next after his death,Charles Darwin's remains were borne with unwonted marks, of respect andceremony, in the assembled presence of all that was noble and good inBritain, to an honoured grave in the precincts of the great Abbey.Wallace and Huxley, Lubbock and Hooker, his nearest peers in the domainof pure science, stood among the bearers who held the pall. Lowellrepresented the republics of America and of letters. Statesmen, andpoets, and philosophers, and theologians mingled with the throng ofscientific thinkers who crowded close around the venerated bier. Noincident of fitting pomp or dignity was wanting as the organ pealed outin solemn strains the special anthem composed for the occasion, to theappropriate words of the Hebrew poet, 'Happy is the man that findethwisdom.' Even the narrow Philistine intelligence itself, which stillknew Darwin only as the man who thought we were all descended frommonkeys, was impressed with the sole standard of greatness open to itsfeeble and shallow comprehension by the mere solemnity and ceremony ofthe occasion, and began to enquire with blind wonderment what thisthinker had done whom a whole people thus delighted to honour.

Of Darwin's pure and exalted moral nature no Englishman of the presentgeneration can trust himself to speak with becoming moderation. His loveof truth, his singleness of heart, his sincerity, his earnestness, hismodesty, his candour, his absolute sinking of self andselfishness—these, indeed, are all conspicuous to every[Pg 175] reader, on thevery face of every word he ever printed. Like his works themselves, theymust long outlive him. But his sympathetic kindliness, his readygenerosity, the staunchness of his friendship, the width and depth andbreadth of his affections, the manner in which 'he bore with those whoblamed him unjustly without blaming them in return,' these things cannever so well be known to any other generation of men as to the threegenerations who walked the world with him. Many even of those who didnot know him loved him like a father; to many who never saw his face,the hope of winning Charles Darwin's approbation and regard was thehighest incentive to thought and action. Towards younger men,especially, his unremitting kindness was always most noteworthy: hespoke and wrote to them, not like one of the masters in Israel, but likea fellow-worker and seeker after truth, interested in their interests,pleased at their successes, sympathetic with their failures, gentle totheir mistakes. Not that he ever spared rightful criticism; on thecontrary, the love of truth was with him so overpowering and enthrallinga motive that he pointed out what seemed to him errors or misconceptionsin the work of others with perfect frankness, fully expecting them to beas pleased and delighted at a suggested amendment of their faultywriting as he himself was in his own case. But his praise was asgenerous as his criticism was frank; and, amid all the toil of hislaborious life in his study at Down, he could always find time to readand comment at full length upon whatever fresh contributions to his ownsubjects the merest tyro might venture to submit for his consideration.He had the sympathetic receptivity[Pg 176] of all truly great minds, and whenhe died, thousands upon thousands who had never beheld his serenefeatures and his fatherly eyes felt they had lost indeed a personalfriend.

Greatness is not always joined with gentleness: in Charles Darwin'scase, by universal consent of all who knew him, 'an intellect which hadno superior' was wedded to 'a character even nobler than theintellect.'[Pg 177]

CHAPTER XI.

DARWIN'S PLACE IN THE EVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT.

To most people Darwinism and evolution mean one and the same thing.After what has here been said, however, with regard to the pre-Darwinianevolutionary movement, and the distinction between the doctrines ofdescent with modification and of natural selection, it need hardly beadded that the two are quite separate and separable in thought, evenwithin the limits of the purely restricted biological order. Darwinismis only a part of organic evolution; the theory, as a whole, owes muchto Darwin, but it does not owe everything to him alone. There werebiological evolutionists before ever he published the 'Origin ofSpecies;' there are biological evolutionists even now who refuse toaccept the truth of his great discovery, and who cling firmly to theprimitive faith set forth in earlier and cruder shapes by ErasmusDarwin, by Lamarck, or by Robert Chambers.

Much more, then, must Darwinism and the entire theory of organicdevelopment to which it belongs be carefully discriminated, as a part orfactor, from evolution at large, as a universal and all-embracingcosmical system. That system itself has gradually emerged as a[Pg 178] slowgrowth of the past two centuries, a progressive development of thecollective scientific and philosophical mind of humanity, not due in itstotality to any one single commanding thinker, but summing itself up atlast in our own time more fully in the person and teaching of Mr.Herbert Spencer than of any other solitary mouthpiece. Indeed,intimately as we all now associate the name of Darwin with the word'evolution,' that term itself (whose vogue is almost entirely due to Mr.Spencer's influence) was one but rarely found upon Darwin's own lips,and but rarely written by his own pen. He speaks rather of developmentand of natural selection than of evolution: his own concern was morewith its special aspect as biological modification than with its generalaspect as cosmical unfolding. Let us ask, then, from this widerstandpoint of a great and far-reaching mental revolution, what wasCharles Darwin's exact niche in the evolutionary movement of the twolast centuries?

Evolutionism, as now commonly understood, may be fairly regarded as amode of envisaging to ourselves the history of the universe, a tendencyor frame of mind, a temperament, one might almost say, or habit ofthought rather than a definite creed or body of dogmas. The evolutionistlooks out upon the cosmos as a continuous process unfolding itself inregular order in obedience to definite natural laws. He sees in it all,not a warring chaos restrained by the constant interference from withoutof a wise and beneficent external power, but a vast aggregate oforiginal elements, perpetually working out their own freshredistribution, in accordance with their own inherent energies. Heregards[Pg 179] the cosmos as an almost infinite collection of material atoms,animated by an almost infinite sum-total of energy, potential orkinetic.

In the very beginning, so far as the mental vision of the astronomer candimly pierce with hypothetical glance the abyss of ages, the matterwhich now composes the material universe seems to have existed in ahighly diffuse and nebulous condition. The gravitative force, however,with which every atom of the whole vast mass was primarily endowed,caused it gradually to aggregate around certain fixed and definitecentres, which became in time the rallying-points or nuclei of futuresuns. The primitive potential energy of separation in the atoms of themass was changed into actual energy of motion as they drew closer andcloser together about the common centre, and into molecular energy orheat as they clashed with one another in bodily impact around thehardening core. Thus arose stars and suns, composed of fiery atomicclouds in a constant state of progressive concentration, evergathering-in the hem of their outer robes on the surface of the solidglobe within, and ever radiating off their store of associated energy tothe impalpable and hypothetical surrounding ether. This, in necessarilybrief and shadowy abstract, is the nebular theory of Kant and Laplace,as amended and supplemented by the modern doctrine of the correlationand conservation of energies.

Applied to the solar system, of which our own planet forms a componentmember, the evolutionary doctrine (in its elder shape) teaches us toenvisage that minor group as the final result of a single great diffuse[Pg 180]nebula, which once spread its faint and cloud-like mass withinconceivable tenuity, at least as far from its centre, now occupied bythe sun's body, as the furthest point in the orbit of Neptune, theoutermost of the yet known planets. From this remote and immenseperiphery it has gradually gathered itself in, growing denser and denserall the time, towards its common core, and has left behind, at irregularintervals, concentric rings or belts of nebulous matter, which, afterrupturing at their weakest point, have hardened and concentrated roundtheir own centre of gravity into Jupiter, Saturn, the Earth, or Venus.The main central body of all, retreating ever within as it dropped inits course the raw material of the planetary masses, has formed, atlast, the sun, the great ruler and luminary of our system. Much as thisprimitive evolutionary concept of the development and history of thesolar system has been modified and altered of late years by recentresearches into the nature of comets and meteors and of the sun'ssurface, it still remains for all practical purposes of popularexposition the best and simplest mental picture of the general type ofastronomical evolution. For the essential point which it impresses uponthe mind is the idea of the planets in their several orbits and withtheir attendant satellites as due, not to external design and specialcreation, in the exact order in which we now see them, but to the slowand regular working out of preordained physical laws, in accordance withwhich they have each naturally assumed, by pure force of circumstances,their existing size, and weight, and orbit, and position.

Geology has applied a similar conception to the[Pg 181] origin and becoming ofthe earth's material and external features as we now know them.Accepting from astronomy the notion of our planet's primary condition asa cooling sphere of incandescent matter, it goes on to show how the twogreat envelopes, atmospheric and oceanic, gaseous and liquid, havegradually formed around its solid core; how the hard crust of thecentral mass has been wrinkled and corrugated into mountain chain anddeep-cut valley, uplifted here into elevated table-land or theredepressed into hollow ocean bed; how sediment has slowly gathered on thefloor of the sea, and how volcanic energies or lateral pressure havesubsequently forced up the resulting deposits into Alpine peaks andmassive continents. In this direction, it was Lyell who principallyintroduced into science the uniformitarian or evolutionary principle,who substituted for the frequent cataclysms and fresh beginnings of theearlier geologists the grand conception of continuous action, producingfrom comparatively infinitesimal but cumulative causes effects which atlast attain by accretion the most colossal proportions.

Here biology next steps in, with its splendid explanation of organiclife, as due essentially to the secondary action of radiated solarenergy on the outer crust of such a cooling and evolving planet. Fallingon the cells of the simplest green plants, the potent sunlightdissociates the carbon from the oxygen in the carbonic acid floating inthe atmosphere, and builds it up with the hydrogen of water in thetissues of the organism into starches and other organic products, whichdiffer from the inert substances around them, mainly by the possessionof locked-up solar energy. On[Pg 182] the energy-yielding food-stuffs thusstored up the animal in turn feeds and battens, reducing what was beforepotential into actual motion, just as the steam-engine reduces thelatent solar energy of coal into visible heat and visible movement inits furnace and its machinery. How the first organism came to existbiology has not yet been able fully to explain for us; but aided bychemical science it has been able to show us in part how some of thesimpler organic bodies may have been originally built up, and it doesnot despair of showing us in the end how the earliest organism mayactually have been produced from the prime elements of oxygen, hydrogen,nitrogen, and carbon. Into this most fundamental of biological problems,however, Darwin himself, with his constitutional caution and dread ofspeculative theorising, was not careful or curious to enter. Even uponthe far less abstruse and hypothetical question, whether all life tookits prime origin from a single starting-point or from several distinctand separate tribal ancestors, he hardly cared so much as to hazard apassing speculation. With splendid self-restraint he confined hisattention almost entirely to the more manageable and practical problemof the origin of species by natural selection, which lay then and thereopen for solution before him. Taking for granted the existence of theoriginal organism or group of organisms, the fact of reproduction, andthe tendency of such reproduction to beget increase in a geometricalratio, he deduced from these elementary given factors the necessarycorollary of survival of the fittest, with all its marvellous andfar-reaching implications of adaptation to the environment and specificdistinctions. By doing[Pg 183] so, he rendered conceivable the mechanism ofevolution in the organic world, thus bringing another great aspect ofexternal nature within the range of the developmental as opposed to themiraculous philosophy of the cosmos.

Psychology, once more, in the hands of Herbert Spencer and hisfollowers, not wholly unaided by Darwin himself, has extended theself-same evolutionary treatment to the involved and elusive phenomenaof mind, and has shown how from the simplest unorganised elements offeeling, the various mental powers and faculties as we now know them,both on the intellectual and on the emotional side, have been slowlybuilt up in the long and ever-varying interaction between the sentientorganism and the natural environment. It has traced the first faintinception of a nervous system as a mere customary channel ofcommunication between part and part; the gradual growth of fibre andganglion; the vague beginnings of external sense-organ and internalbrain; the final perfection of eye and ear, of sight and hearing, ofpleasure and pain, of intellect and volition. It has thus done for thesubjective or mental half of our complex nature what biology, asconceived by Darwin, has done for the physical or purely organic half;it has traced the origin and development of mind, without a singlebreak, from its first faint and half-unconscious manifestation in thepolyp or the jelly-fish to its final grand and varied outcome in thesoul of the poet or the intellect of the philosopher.

Finally, sociology has applied the evolutionary method to the origin andrise of human societies, with their languages, customs, arts, andinstitutions, their[Pg 184] governmental organisation and their ecclesiasticalpolity. Taking from biology the evolving savage, viewed as a developedand highly gifted product of the anthropoid stock, it has shown by whatstages and through what causes he has slowly aggregated into tribes andnations; has built up his communal, polygamic, or monogamic family; haslearnt the use of fire, of implements, of pottery, of metals; hasdeveloped the whole resources of oral speech and significant gesture;has invented writing, pictorial or alphabetic; has grown up to science,to philosophy, to morals, and to religion. The chief honours of thisparticular line of enquiry, the latest and youngest of all to receivethe impact of the evolutionary impulse, belong mainly to Tylor, Lubbock,and Spencer in England, and to Haeckel, De Mortillet, and Wagner on thecontinent.

In the sublime conception of the external universe and its presentworkings which we thus owe to the independent efforts of so many greatprogressive thinkers, and which has here been briefly and inadequatelysketched out, Darwin's work in life falls naturally into its own placeas the principal contribution to the evolutionary movement in thespecial biological department of thought. Within the more limited rangeof that department itself, the evolutionary impulse did not owe itsorigin to Charles Darwin personally; it took its rise with ErasmusDarwin, Buffon, and Lamarck, and it derived from our great modernEnglish naturalist its final explanation and definitive proof alone. Butjust as the evolutionary movement in astronomy and cosmical thought isrightly associated in all our minds with the mighty theories of Kant,Laplace, and Herschel;[Pg 185] just as the evolutionary movement in geology isrightly associated with the far lesser yet brilliant and effectivepersonality of Lyell; just as the evolutionary movement in thederivative sciences is rightly associated with so many great stillliving thinkers; so the evolutionary movement in biology in particularrightly sums itself up in the honoured name of Charles Darwin. For whatothers suspected, he was the first to prove; where others speculated, hewas the first to observe, to experiment, to demonstrate, and toconvince.

It should be noted, too, that while to us who come after, the greatcomplex evolutionary movement of the two last centuries justly revealsitself as one and indivisible, a single grand cosmical drama, havingmany acts and many scenes, but all alike inspired by one informing andpervading unity, yet to those whose half unconscious co-operation slowlybuilt it up by episodes, piecemeal, each act and each scene unrolleditself separately as an end in itself, to be then and there attained andproved, quite apart from the conception of its analytic value as a partin a great harmonious natural poem of the constitution of things. Thoughevolution appears to us now as a single grand continuous process, aphase of the universe dependent upon a preponderating aggregation ofmatter and dissipation of energy, yet to Kant and Laplace it was theastronomical aspect alone that proved attractive, to Darwin it was thebiological aspect alone, and to many of the modern workers in the minorfields it is the human and sociological aspect that almost monopolisesthe whole wide mental horizon. No greater proof can be given of thesubjective distinctness of parts in what was objectively[Pg 186] andfundamentally a single broad psychological revolution of the human mind,than the fact that Lyell himself, who more than any one man hadintroduced the evolutionary conception into the treatment of geology,should have stood out so long and fought so blindly against theevolutionary conception in the organic world. Indeed, it was not untilthe various scattered and many-coloured strands of evolutionary thoughthad been gathered together and woven into one by the vast catholic andsynthetic intelligence of Herbert Spencer that the idea of evolution asa whole, as a single continuous cosmical process, began to beapprehended and gradually assimilated by the picked intelligences of theseveral distinct scientific departments.

Observe also that the evolutionary method has invaded each of theconcrete sciences in the exact order of their natural place in thehierarchy of knowledge. It had been applied to astronomy by Kant andLaplace before it was applied to geology by Lyell; it had been appliedto geology by Lyell before it was applied to biology by Darwin; it hadbeen applied to biology (in part, at least) by Lamarck and the Darwinsbefore it was applied to psychology by Spencer; and it is only at thevery end of all that it has been applied to sociology and the alliedbranches of thought by a hundred different earnest workers incontemporary Europe. Each stage helped on the next; each was dependentonly on those that went naturally before it, and aided in turn thesubsequent development of those that naturally came after it.

Nevertheless, the popular instinct which regards Darwinism and evolutionas practically synonymous is[Pg 187] to a large extent justified by the actualfacts of the psychological upheaval. Darwin's work forms on the wholethe central keystone of the evolutionary system, and deserves the honourwhich has been thrust upon it of supporting by its own mass the entiresuperstructure of the development theory.

For, in the first place, Darwin had to deal with the science of life,the science where the opposition to evolutionism was sure to bestrongest, and where the forces and tendencies in favour of obscurantismwere sure to gather in fullest force. Every other great onward step inour knowledge of our own relation to the universe of which we form apart had been compelled indeed to run the gauntlet, in its own time, ofecclesiastical censure and of popular dislike. Those inveterateprejudices of human ignorance which sedulously hide their genuine shapeunder the guise of dogma masquerading as religion, had long sincebrought to bear their baneful resources upon the discoveries ofCopernicus and the theories of Galileo, as blind, misleading, anddiabolical lights, opposed to the sure and certain warranty of HolyScripture. Newton, again, had in due time been blamed in that he boldlysubstituted (as his critics declared) the bald and barren formula ofgravitation for the personal superintendence of a divine Providence.Laplace had been accused of dethroning the deity from the centre andgovernance of his celestial system. Around the early geologists thebattle of the six days of creation had raged fiercely for nearly half acentury. But all these varying modes of thought, though deemed hereticalenough in their own day, had touched, as it[Pg 188] were, but the minorramparts and unimportant out-works of the great obscurantist dogmaticstrongholds: Darwinism, by openly attacking the inmost problems of lifeand mind, had brought to bear its powerful artillery upon the very keepand highest tower of the fortress itself. The belief that the variousstars, planets, and satellites had or had not been wisely created intheir existing positions, and with their present orbits, movements, andrelations accurately fore-measured, did not fundamentally affect, forgood or evil, the cherished dogmas of the ordinary multitude. But theanalogous belief in the distinct and separate creation of plants andanimals, and more especially of the human species, was far more closelyand intimately bound up with all the current religious conceptions. Itwas at first supposed, not perhaps without some practical wisdom, thatto upset the primitive faith in the separate creation of living beingswas to loosen and imperil the very foundations of common morality andrevealed religion. The 'argument from design' had been immemoriallyregarded as the principal buttress of orthodox thought. Theologians hadunwisely staked their all upon the teleological dogma, and could illafford to retire without a blow from that tenaciously defended bastionof their main position. Hence the evolutionary concept had its hardestfight to wage over the biological field; and when that field was oncefairly won, it had little more to fear from banded preconceptions andestablished prejudices in any other portion of the wide territory itclaimed for its own.

In the second place, biological evolution, firmly established by Darwinon a safe, certain, and unimpeachable basis, led naturally and almostinevitably to[Pg 189] all the other innumerable applications of theevolutionary method, in the domains of psychology, sociology, philology,political thought, and ethical science. Hence the immediate and visibleresults of its promulgation have been far more striking, noticeable, andevident than those which followed the establishment of the evolutionaryconception in the astronomical and geological departments. It waspossible to accept cosmical evolution and solar evolution and planetaryevolution, without at the same time accepting evolution in therestricted field of life and mind. But it was impossible to acceptevolution in biology without at the same time extending its applicationto psychology, to the social organism, to language, to ethics, to allthe thousand and one varied interests of human life and humandevelopment. Now, most people are little moved by speculations andhypotheses as to the origin of the milky way or the belt of Orion; theycare very slightly for Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings; they arestolidly incurious as to the development of the earth's crust, or theprecise date of the cretaceous epoch; but they understand and begin tobe touched the moment you come to the practical questions of man'sorigin, nature, and history. Darwinism compelled their attention by itsimmediate connection with their own race; and the proof of this truth isamply shown by the mere fact that out of all the immense variety ofCharles Darwin's theories and ideas, the solitary one which alone hassucceeded in attaching to itself the public interest and public ridiculeis the theory of man's ultimate descent from a monkey-like ancestor.Popular instinct, here as elsewhere profoundly true at core in the midstof all its superficial foolishness, has[Pg 190] rightly hit upon the centralelement in the Darwinian conception which more than any other has causedits fruitful and wonderful expansion through every fertile field ofhuman enquiry.

In short, it was Darwin's task in life to draw down evolution fromheaven to earth, and to bring within the scope of its luminous methodall that is most interesting to the uninstructed and unsophisticatedheart of the natural man.

The application of the evolutionary principle to the world of life,human or animal, thus presents itself as the chief philosophic andscientific achievement of the nineteenth century. Throughout the wholemiddle decades of the present age, the human mind in all its highestembodiments was eagerly searching, groping, and enquiring after anaturalistic explanation of the origin and progress of organic life. Inthe vast scheme for the System of Synthetic Philosophy which HerbertSpencer set forth as an anticipatory synopsis of his projected work, thephilosopher of development leapt at once from the First Principles ofevolution as a whole to the Principles of Biology, Psychology, andSociology, omitting all reference to the application of evolution to thevast field of inorganic nature; and he did so on the distinctly statedground that its application to organic nature was then and there moreimportant and interesting. That suggestive expression of belief aptlysums up the general attitude of scientific and philosophic minds at theprecise moment of the advent of Darwinism. Kant and Laplace and Lyellhad already applied the evolutionary method to suns and systems, toplanets and continents; what was needed next was that some[Pg 191] deeplylearned and universally equipped biological leader should help the lameevolutionism of Lamarck over the organic stile, and leave it free toroam the boundless fields of what Mr. Spencer has sometimes welldescribed as the super-organic sciences. For that office, Darwin at theexact moment presented himself; and his victory and its results rightlyentitle him to the popular regard as the founder of all that most menmean when they speak together in everyday conversation of the doctrineof evolution.

On the other hand, the total esoteric philosophic conception ofevolution as a cosmical process, one and continuous from nebula to man,from star to soul, from atom to society, we owe rather to the othergreat prophet of the evolutionary creed, Herbert Spencer, whose namewill ever be equally remembered side by side with his mighty peer's, ina place of high collateral glory. It is he who has given us the generaldefinition of evolution as a progress from an indefinite, incoherenthomogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, accompanying anintegration of matter and dissipation of motion, or, as we should nowperhaps more correctly say, of energy. In the establishment of thevarious lines of thought which merge at last in that magnificentcosmical law, it was Darwin's special task to bring the phenomena oforganic life well within the clear ken of known and invariable naturalprocesses[Pg 192].

CHAPTER XII.

THE NET RESULT.

And now let us ask ourselves, in all sincerity, what was the finaloutcome and net result of Darwin's great and useful life?

If Charles Darwin had never existed at all, there would still have beena considerable and expansive evolutionary movement both in biology andin its sister sciences throughout the latter half of the presentcentury. The harvest indeed was ready, and the labourers, though few,were full of vigour. Suppose for a moment that that earnest andsingle-hearted Darwinian genius had been cut off by some untimelydisease of childhood at five years old, all other conditions remainingas they were, we should even so have had in our midst to-day, a smallphilosophical and influential band of evolutionary workers. Spencerwould none the less have given us his 'First Principles' and the majorpart of his 'Principles of Biology,' with comparatively littlealteration or omission. Wallace would none the less have promulgated hisinchoate theory of natural selection, and rallied round his primordialconception the very best and deepest minds of the biological fraction.Geology would have enforced the continuity[Pg 193] of types; Cope and Marshwould have unearthed for our edification the ancestral forms of theevolving horse and the toothed birds of the Western American deposits.The Solenhofen lithographic slates would still have yielded us thehalf-reptilian, half-avian Archæopteryx; the tertiary deposits wouldstill have presented us with a long suite of gradually specialised andmodified mammalian forms. The Siberian meadows would have sent us thatintermediate creature which Prjevalsky recognises as the half-way housebetween the horses and the donkeys; the rivers of Queensland would havedisclosed to our view that strange lung-bearing and gill-breathingbarramunda, in which Günther discerns the missing link between theganoid fishes on the one hand, and the mudfish and salamandroidamphibians on the other. From data such as these, biologists andpalæontologists of the calibre of Huxley, Gaudry, Geikie, Rütimeyer, andBusk, would necessarily have derived, by the aid of Wallace's pregnantprinciple, conclusions not so very far remote from Darwin's own. Heerand Saporta would have drawn somewhat similar inferences from the fossilflora of Switzerland and of Greenland; Hooker and De Candolle would haveread pretty much the self-same lessons in the scattered ferns and scantypalm-trees of oceanic islands. Kowalevsky would have seen in theascidian larva a common prototype of the vertebrate series; thefollowers of Von Baer would have popularised the embryologicalconception of the single origin of animal life. The researches ofBoucher de Perthes, of Lyell, of Evans, of Boyd Dawkins, of Keller, andof Christy and Lartet, would have unrolled before our eyes, under anycircumstances, the strange[Pg 194] story of prehistoric man. On the facts sogained, Lubbock and Tylor, Schaafhausen and Büchner, would have built uptheir various consistent theories of human development and humanculture. In short, even without Charles Darwin, the nineteenth centurywould not have stood still; it would have followed in the wake of Buffonand Diderot, of Lamarck and Laplace, of St. Hilaire and Goethe, of Kantand Herschel, of Hutton and Lyell, of Malthus and of Spencer. The greatworld never rolls down the abysses of time obedient to the nod of onesingle overruling Titanic intellect. 'If the doctrine of evolution hadnot existed,' says Huxley, 'palæontologists must have invented it.'

But Charles Darwin acted, nevertheless, the part of an immense andpowerful accelerating energy. The impetus which he gave gained us atleast fifty years of progress; it sent us at a bound from Copernicus toNewton; so far as ordinary minds were concerned, indeed, it transcendedat a single leap the whole interval from Ptolemy to Herschel. Thecomparison is far from being a mere rhetorical one. A close analogyreally exists between the two cases. Before Copernicus, the earth stoodfixed and immovable in the centre of the universe, with obsequious suns,and planets, and satellites dancing attendance in cycle and epicyclearound the solid mass, to which by day and night they continuallyministered. The great astronomical revolution begun by Copernicus,Galileo, and Kepler, and completed by Newton, Laplace, and Herschel,reduced the earth to its true position as a petty planet, revolvingfeebly among its bigger brethren round a petty sun, in some lost cornerof a vast, majestic, and almost illimitable galaxy. Even so, beforeDarwin,[Pg 195] man stood in his own esteem the fixed point of ananthropocentric universe, divinely born and divinely instructed, withall the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air, and the fruits ofthe earth specially created with a definite purpose in subservience tohis lordly wants and interests. The great biological revolution, whichrightly almost sums itself up in the name of Darwin, reduced man at onceto his true position as the last product of kinetic solar energy,working upon the peculiar chemical elements of an evolving planet. Itshowed that every part of every plant and every animal existed primarilyfor the sake of that plant or animal alone; it unseated man from hisimaginary throne in the centre of the cosmos, teaching him at once alesson of humility and a lesson of aspiration—pointing out to him howlow was the origin from which, in very truth, he first sprang, andsuggesting to him, at the same time, how high was the grand and gloriousdestiny to which by his own strenuous and ardent efforts he might yetperchance some day attain.

That result, inevitable perhaps in the long run, from the slow unfoldingof human intelligence, was immensely hastened in our own time by thepeculiar idiosyncrasy and lofty personality of Charles Darwin. Withouthim we should have had, not only evolutionism, but also, as Wallace'sdiscovery testifies, natural selection itself into the bargain. But weshould never have had the 'Origin of Species.' We should never have hadthat vast and enthusiastic consensus of scientific opinion through anall but unanimous thinking world, which has forced an immediateacceptance of evolutionary ideas down the unwilling throats of halfunthinking Europe. The[Pg 196] prodigious mass of Darwin's facts, the cautiousworking of Darwin's intellect, the immense weight of Darwin'sreputation, the crushing force of Darwin's masterly inductive method,bore down before them all opposition in the inner circle of biologists,and secured the triumph of the evolutionary system even in the verystrongholds of ignorance and obscurantism. Without Darwin, a small groupof philosophic thinkers would still be striving to impress upon anincredulous and somewhat contemptuous world the central truths of theevolutionary doctrine. The opposition of the elders, long headed even inthe society we actually know by a few stern scientific recalcitrants,like Owen and Agassiz, Pictet and Dawson, Virchow and Mivart, would havefought desperately in the last trench for the final figment of thefixity of species. What is now the general creed, more or less looselyheld and imperfectly understood, of hundreds and thousands among theintelligent mass, would, under such circumstances, be even yet the mereparty-shibboleth of an esoteric few, struggling hard against the bareforce of overwhelming numbers to ensure not only recognition but a fairhearing for the first principles of the development theory. It is toDarwin, and to Darwin almost alone, that we owe the presentcomparatively wide acceptance of the all-embracing doctrine ofevolution.

No other man did so much or could have done so much to ensure itstriumph. He began early in life to collect and arrange a vastencyclopædia of facts, all finally focussed with supreme skill upon thegreat principle he so clearly perceived, and so lucidly expounded. Hebrought to bear upon the question an amount of[Pg 197] personal observation, ofminute experiment, of world-wide book-knowledge, of universal scientificability, such as never perhaps was lavished by any other man upon anyother department of study. His conspicuous and beautiful love of truth,his unflinching candour, his transparent fearlessness and honesty ofpurpose, his child-like simplicity, his modesty of demeanour, hischarming manner, his affectionate disposition, his kindliness to friends,his courtesy to opponents, his gentleness to harsh and often bitterassailants, kindled in the minds of men of science everywhere throughoutthe world a contagious enthusiasm, only equalled perhaps among thedisciples of Socrates and the great teachers of the revival of learning.His name became a rallying-point for the children of light in everycountry; and what philosophers and speculators might have taken acentury or two more to establish in embryo was firmly grounded, never tobe overthrown, by the vast accumulations of fact and argument in the'Origin of Species,' and its companion volumes.

The end of that great Darwinian revolution the world has not yet seen:in a sense, indeed, it will never see it. For the general acceptance ofDarwin's theory, which we may watch progressing around us every minuteto-day, implies a completebouleversement of anthropocentric ideas, atotal change in our human conception of our own relations to the worldand the universe, which must work out for ever increasinglywide-reaching and complex effects in all our dealings with one anotherand with the environment at large. There is no department of humanthought or human action which evolutionism leaves exactly where itstood[Pg 198] before the advent of the Darwinian conception. In nothing is thisfact more conspicuously seen than in the immediate obsolescence (if onemay so speak) of all the statical pre-Darwinian philosophies whichignored development, as soon as ever the new progressive evolutionarytheories had fairly burst upon an astonished world. Dogmatic Comte wasleft forthwith to his little band of devoted adherents; shadowy Hegelwas relegated with a bow to the cool shades of the common-rooms ofOxford; Buckle was exploded like an inflated wind-bag; even Millhimself—magnum et venerabile nomen—with all his mighty steam-hammerforce of logical directness, was felt instinctively to be lacking infull appreciation of the dynamic and kinetic element in universalnature. Spencer and Hartmann, Haeckel and Clifford, had the field tothemselves for the establishment of their essentially evolutionarysystems. Great thinkers of the elder generation, like Bain and Lyell,felt bound to remodel their earlier conceptions by the light of the newDarwinian hypotheses. Those who failed by congenital constitution to doso, like Carlyle and Carpenter, were, philosophically speaking, lefthopelessly behind and utterly extinguished. Those who only halfsucceeded in thus reading themselves into the new ideas, like Lewes andMax Müller, lost ground immediately before the eager onslaught of theiryounger competitors. 'The world is to the young,' says the easternproverb; and in a world peopled throughout in the high places of thoughtby men almost without exception evolutionists, there was little or noplace for the timid group of stranded Girondins, who still stood aloofin sullen antique scientific orthodoxy from what[Pg 199] seemed to them thecarmagnoles and orgies of a biological Thermidor.

At the same time, it must be steadily remembered that there are manynaturalists at the present day, especially among those of the lowerorder of intelligence, who, while accepting evolutionism in a generalway, and therefore always describing themselves as Darwinians, do notbelieve and often cannot even understand the distinctive Darwinianaddition to the evolutionary doctrine—namely, the principle of naturalselection. Such hazy and indistinct thinkers as these are still reallyat the prior stage of Lamarckian evolutionism. It is probable that inthe future, while a formal acceptance of Darwinism becomes general, thespecial theory of natural selection will be thoroughly understood andassimilated only by the more abstract and philosophical minds. Ourchildren will be taught as a matter of course the doctrine ofdevelopment or of descent with modification; but the rationale of thatdescent will still remain in all likelihood always beyond the grasp ofmost of them: just as thousands accept on authority the Copernicanastronomy, who would never even be capable of comprehending the simplestproofs of the earth's annual movement round the sun. Thus the name ofDarwin will often no doubt be tacked on to what are in reality theprinciples of Lamarck.

Every day, however, in spite of such half-ignorant adherents, theeffects of true Darwinism are widening and deepening. One group ofearnest workers is using it now as a guide to physiological,embryological, and anatomical researches. Another is employing it withzeal and skill in the field of classificatory and physiological[Pg 200] botany.Yet others are working out its psychological implications, enquiringinto instinct and animal intelligence, and solving by its aid abstruseproblems of the human mind and the human emotions. One philosopher hasbrought it to bear on questions of ethics, another on questions ofsocial and political economy. Its principles have been applied in oneplace to æsthetics, in another place to logic, in a third place to theorigin and growth of religion. The study of language has derived newlights from the great central Darwinian luminary. The art of educationis beginning to feel the progressive influence of the Darwinian impulse.In fact, there is hardly a single original worker in any department ofthought or science who has not been more or less profoundly affected,whether he knows it or whether he knows it not, by the vast spreadingand circling wave of the Darwinian conceptions. All our ideas have beenrevolutionised and evolutionised. The new notions are abroad in theworld, quickening with their fresh and vigorous germinal power the drybones of all the sciences, all the arts, and all the philosophies.

And evolutionism is gradually though slowly filtering downward. It ispermeating the daily press of the nations, and gaining for itsvocabulary a recognised place in the phraseology of the unlearnedvulgar. Such expressions as 'natural selection,' 'survival of thefittest,' 'struggle for existence,' 'adaptation to the environment,' andall the rest of it, are becoming as household words upon the lips ofthousands who only know the name of Darwin as a butt for the petty emptyjibes of infinitesimal cheap witlings. And Darwinism[Pg 201] will trickle downstill through a thousand channels, by definite popularisation, and stillmore by indefinite absorption into the common thought of universalhumanity, till it becomes part and parcel of the general inheritance,bred in our bone and burnt into our blood, an heir-loom of our race toall time and in all countries. Great thoughts like his do not readilydie: they expand and grow in ten thousand bosoms, till they transformthe world at last into their own likeness, and adapt it to theenvironment they have themselves created by their informing power.

Happy above ordinary human happiness, Charles Darwin lived himself tosee the prosperous beginning of this great silent philosophicalrevolution. Harvey's grand discovery, it has been well said, was scoffedat for nearly a whole generation. Newton's marvellous law of gravitationwas coldly received even by the gigantic intellect of Leibnitz himself.Francis Bacon, in disgrace and humiliation, could only commend his nameand memory 'to foreign nations and to the next age.' It is too often sowith thinkers of the first and highest order: it was not so, happily,with the gentle soul of Charles Darwin. Alone among the prophets andteachers of triumphant creeds, he saw with his own eyes the adoption ofthe faith he had been the first to promulgate in all its fulness byevery fresh and powerful mind of the younger race that grew up aroundhim. The Nestor of evolutionism, he had lived among two successivegenerations of thinkers, and over the third he ruled as king. With thatcrowning joy of a great, a noble, and a happy life, let us leave himhere alone in his glory.[Pg 202]

INDEX.

AGASSIZ,17,33
Anticipations of natural selection,81
'Antiquity of Man,'120
Astronomy,15

BADEN-POWELL,78
Bahia,43
Bates,18; in Brazil,79; on mimicry,117
'Beagle,' voyage of the,38; Zoology of,59
Bell, Sir C,155
Boucher de Perthes,120
Brazil,43
British Association,118
Buffon,7

CHAMBERS, Robert,18; his 'Vestiges of Creation,'70
Colenso on the Pentateuch,121
'Coral Reefs,'68
Cuvier,12; as a geologist,13; system of animals,63

DARWIN, Charles, his ancestry,20; birth,27; birthplace,31;
contemporaries,33; education,34; at Edinburgh University,ib.;
at Cambridge,35; starts on the voyage of the 'Beagle,'38; returns to
England,58; publishes his journal,59; plans 'Origin of Species,'60;
elected to Royal Society,64; secretary to Geological Society,64;
marries,ib.; publishes 'Coral Reefs,'68; geological
observations,76; Monograph on Barnacles,ib.; publishes 'Origin
of Species,'86; its success,112; second edition,114; variation of
animals and plants,125; pangenesis,126; fertilisation of orchids,127;
'Descent of Man,'132; later works,155; last illness and death,173;
character,174; place in evolutionary movement,177; outcome of his work,
[Pg 204]192.

DARWIN, Erasmus,10; his life,20; appearance,21; poems,ib.;
'Zoonomia',21; 'Temple of Nature,'25; his marriages,25; on descent of
man,133; on sexual selection,146

Darwin, Erasmus, the younger,34
Darwin, Robert,20
Darwin, Robert Waring,25,26; his home,31
De Candolle,63
Down House, Darwin settles at,65
Du Chaillu,134

EARTHWORMS,66,168
Edgeworth,25
Evolution, general theory of,177

FILHOL,168
Fiske, Prof.,58; on natural selection,130
Fitzroy, Captain,38
Fuegians,51

GALAPAGOS ISLANDS,52
Galton, Francis,27
Gaudry,168
Geology, rise of,13; evolutionary aspect of,180
Goethe,9,12; on animal origin of man,133
Gorilla,134
Gray, Asa,78,124

HAECKEL, letter to,67; 'History of Creation,'124; on sexual selection,151
Henslow, Prof.,35; recommends Darwin to Capt. Fitzroy,38; at Oxford,118
Herbert, Dean,18
Herschel, Sir Wm.,15
Holland, Sir Henry,27
Hooker, Sir Joseph,74; on catasetum,78; accepts Darwinism,117;
publishes his 'Flora of Australia,'ib.
Horner, Leonard,17
Humboldt,33
Huxley, Prof., lecture at Royal Institution,117; 'Man's Place in
Nature,'122; on coming of age of 'Origin of Species,'166

JUSSIEU,63

KANT, nebular hypothesis,15
Knight's law,159
Kölreuter,159

LAMARCK,10; Darwin's reading of,47; on descent of man,133
Laplace, nebular hypothesis,15
Lecoq,18
Linnæus,6; his artificial system,63
Lyell,14,64; 'Principles of Geology,'69; extract from letters,78;
anticipations of natural selection,99; slow acceptance of Darwinism,
[Pg 205]119; 'Antiquity of Man,'120

MALTHUS,15; influence on Darwin,50,67,74,94
Matthew, Patrick,18; extracts from,82
Mimicry,79
Monte Video, Darwin at,46
Mould, formation of,66
Mount, the,31
Müller, Fritz,124
Müller, Hermann,124
Murchison,14

'NATURALIST on the Amazons,'79
'Naturalist's Voyage round the World' published,59
Natural system,63
Nebular hypothesis,15,179
New Zealand, Darwin at,54

OKEN,17
'Origin of Species,' first planned,60; projected,78; published,86;
analysis of,89; its success,112; second edition,114
Owen, Sir R.,33,59; on types,78

PANGENESIS,126
'Philosophie Zoologique,'12
Population, Malthus's essay on,16,51
Powell, Baden-,78
'Physiological Units,'126
Psychology, evolution in,183

RAFINESQUE,69
Rio Janeiro, Darwin at,45

ST. HILAIRE, Geoffroy,9; the younger,77
St. Paul's Rocks,43
Sexual selection, first glimpse of,45; Darwin's theory of,144
Smith, William,13
Sociology,183
Spencer, Herbert,17; on 'Vestiges of Creation,'72; essay in the
'Leader,'77; 'Principles of Psychology,'ib.; essay in
'Westminster Review,'84; extracts from 'Leader' essay,88; accepts
Darwin's theory,118; 'Principles of Biology,'ib.; 'Physiological
Units,'126; theory of evolution,191
Sprengel,103,158

THOMPSON, Allen,163
Treviranus,17
Tucutuco,47
Tyndall, Prof.,163

'VESTIGES of Creation,'18; criticism of,70
Von Baer,18
[Pg 206]Von Buch,18

WALLACE, Alfred Russel,18; goes to Brazil,79; publishes his travels,80;
in Malay archipelago,ib.; discovers natural selection,ib.;
paper at Linnean Society,81; on sexual selection,153
Wedgwood, Emma,65
Wedgwood, Hensleigh,27
Wedgwood, Josiah,27,28
Wedgwood, Susannah,27
Wells, Dr., anticipates natural selection,81
White, Gilbert, on worms,169
Wollaston,18
Worms, action of,66,168
Wright, Chauncey,124

'ZOONOMIA,' Erasmus Darwin's,22