will trickle down still through a thousand channels, by definite popularisation, and still more by indefinite absorption into the common thought of universal humanity, 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 to all time and in all countries. Great thoughts like his do not readily die: they expand and grow in ten thousand bosoms, till they transform the world at last into their own likeness, and adapt it to the environment they have themselves created by their informing power. Happy above ordinary human happiness, Charles Darwin lived himself to see the prosperous beginning of this great silent philosophical revolution. Harvey's grand discovery, it has been well said, was scoffed at for nearly a whole generation. Newton's marvellous law of gravitation was coldly received even by the gigantic intellect of Leibnitz himself. Francis Bacon, in disgrace and humiliation, could only commend his name and memory 'to foreign nations and to the next age.' It is too often so with thinkers of the first and highest order: it was not so, happily, with the gentle soul of Charles Darwin. Alone among the prophets and teachers of triumphant creeds, he saw with his own eyes the adoption of the faith he had been the first to promulgate in all its fulness by every fresh and powerful mind of the younger race that grew up around him. The Nestor of evolutionism, he had lived among two successive generations of thinkers, and over the third he ruled as king. With that crowning joy of a great, a noble, and a happy life, let us leave him here alone in his glory. INDEX. AGASSIZ AGASSIZ, 17, 33 Anticipations of natural selec- 'Antiquity of Man,' 120 BADEN-POWELL, 78 Bates, 18; in Brazil, 79; on mimicry, 117 'Beagle,' voyage of the, 38; Bell, Sir C., 155 Boucher de Perthes, 120 Brazil, 43 British Association, 118 CHAMBERS, Robert, 18; his 'Vestiges of Creation,' 70 Cuvier, 12; as a geologist, 13; DARWIN DARWIN, Charles, his ancestry, DARWIN 177; outcome of his work, 192 Darwin, Erasmus, 10; his life, Darwin, Robert, 20 Darwin, Robert Waring, 25, 26; De Candolle, 63 Down House, Darwin settles Du Chaillu, 134 EARTHWORMS, 66, 168 Edgeworth, 25 Evolution, general theory of, 177 LYELL HAECKEL, letter to, 67; Huxley, Prof., lecture at Royal JUSSIEU, 63 VON BUCH Powell, Baden-, 78 RAFINESQUE, 69 Rio Janeiro, Darwin at, 45 ST. HILAIRE, Geoffroy, 9; the St. Paul's Rocks, 43 Smith, William, 13 Spencer, Herbert, 17; on THOMPSON, Allen, 163 Treviranus, 17 Tucutuco, 47 Tyndall, Prof., 163 'VESTIGES of Creation,' 18; criticism of, 70 Von Baer, 18 Von Buch, 18 |