another, with the remains of just such undifferentiated family starting-points.

Stress has mainly been laid, in this brief and necessarily imperfect abstract, on the essentially Darwinian principle of natural selection. But Darwin did not himself attribute everything to this potent factor in the moulding of species. 'I am convinced,' he wrote pointedly in the introduction to his first edition, that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.' He attributed considerable importance as well to the Lamarckian principle of use and disuse, already so fully insisted upon before him by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The chief factors in his compound theory, as given in his own words at the end of his work, are as follows: Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability, from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase, so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character, and the Extinction of the less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.'

Such was the simple and inoffensive-looking bombshell which Darwin launched, from his quiet home at Down into the very midst of the teleological camp in. the peaceful year 1859. Subsequent generations will remember the date as a crisis and turning-point in the history of mankind.

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 stately tree, that overshadowed with its spreading branches all the corners of the earth.

The soil, indeed, had been carefully broken for it beforehand Lamarck and St. Hilaire, Spencer and Chambers, had ploughed and harrowed in all diligence; and the minds of men were thoroughly ready for the assimilation of the new doctrine. But the seed itself, too, was the right germ for the exact moment; it contained within itself the vivifying principle that enabled it to grow and wax exceeding great where kindred germs before had withered away, or had borne but scanty and immature fruit.

Two conditions contributed to this result, one external, the other internal.

First for the less important external consideration. Darwin himself was a sound man with an established reputation for solidity and learning. That gained for his theory from the very first outset universal respect

and a fair hearing. Herbert Spencer was known to be a philosopher and the practical English nation mistrusts philosophers: those people probe too deep and soar too high for any sensible person to follow them in all their flights. Robert Chambers, the unknown author of Vestiges of Creation,' was a shallow sciolist; it was whispered abroad that he was even inaccurate and slovenly in his facts: and your scientific plodder detests the very shadow of minute inaccuracy, though it speak with the tongues of men and angels, and be bound up with all the grasp and power of a Newton or a Goethe. But Charles Darwin was a known personage, an F.R.S., a distinguished authority upon coral reefs and barnacles, a great geologist, a great biologist, a great observer and indefatigable collector. His book came into the public hands stamped with the imprimatur of official recognition. Darwin was the father of the infant theory; Lyell and Hooker stood for its sponsors. The world could not afford to despise its contents; they could not brand its author offhand as a clever dreamer or a foolish amateur, or consign him to the dreaded English limbo of the 'mere theorist.'

Next, for the other and far more important internal consideration. The book itself was one of the greatest, the most learned, the most lucid, the most logical, the most crushing, the most conclusive, that the world had ever yet seen. Step by step, and principle by principle, it proved every point in its progress triumphantly before it went on to demonstrate the next. So vast an array of facts so thoroughly in hand had never before been mustered and marshalled in favour of any biological theory. Those who had insight to learn and

understand were convinced at once by the cogency of the argument; those who had not were overpowered and silenced by the weight of the authority and the mass of the learning. A hot battle burst forth at once, no doubt, around the successful volume; but it was one of those battles which are aroused only by great truths, - a battle in which the victory is a foregone conclusion, and the rancour of the assailants the highest compliment to the prowess of the assailed.

Darwin himself, in his quiet country home at Down, was simply astonished at the rapid success of his own work. The first edition was published at the end of November 1859; it was exhausted almost immediately, and a second was got ready in hot haste by the beginning of January 1860. In less than six weeks the book had become famous, and Darwin found himself the centre of a European contest, waged with exceeding bitterness, over the truth or falsity of his wonderful volume. To the world at large Darwinism and evolution became at once synonymous terms. The same people who would entirely ascribe the Protestant Reformation to the account of Luther, and the inductive philosophy to the account of Bacon, also believed, in the simplicity of their hearts, that the whole vast evolutionary movement was due at bottom to that very insidious and dangerous book of Mr. Darwin's.

The fact is, profound as had been the impulses in the evolutionary direction among men of science before Darwin's work appeared at all, immense as were the throes and pangs of labour throughout all Europe which preceded and accompanied its actual birth, when it came at last it came to the general world of unscientific readers with all the sudden vividness and novelty of a

tremendous earthquake. Long predestined, it was yet wholly unexpected. Men at large had known nothing or next to nothing of this colossal but hidden revolutionary force which had been gathering head and energy for so many years unseen within the bowels of the earth; and now that its outer manifestation had actually burst upon them, they felt the solid ground of dogmatic security bodily giving way beneath their feet, and knew not where to turn in their extremity for support. Naturally, it was the theological interest that felt itself at first most forcibly assailed. The first few chapters of Genesis, or rather the belief in their scientific and historical character, already sapped by the revelations of geology, seemed to orthodox defenders to be fatally undermined if the Darwinian hypothesis were once to meet with general recognition. The first resource of menaced orthodoxy is always to deny the alleged facts; the second is to patch up tardily the feeble and hollow modus vivendi of an artificial pact. On this occasion the orthodox acted strictly after their kind: but to their credit it should be added that they yielded gracefully in the long run to the unanimous voice of scientific opinion. Twenty-three years later, when all that was mortal of Charles Darwin was being borne with pomp and pageantry to its last restingplace in Westminster Abbey, enlightened orthodoxy, with generous oblivion, ratified a truce over the dead body of the great leader, and, outgrowing its original dread of naturalistic interpretations, accepted his theory without reserve as 'not necessarily hostile to the main fundamental truths of religion.' Let us render justice to the vanquished in a memorable struggle. Churchmen