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INTRODUCTION

BY

T. C. CHAMBERLIN

THE greatness of a man is shown in what he is, in what he does, and in what he sets a-doing.

If the long list of contributions to the sessions of this Association have been, for these fifty were searched for products of thought whose stimulus sprang from the life and works of Charles Darwin, it would reveal an impressive testimonial to his greatness as a power in our scientific world. If it were possible to give such an intellectual product a material embodiment and an appropriate form, we could raise no more sincere monument to his memory. Even in the less tangible form it inevitably bears, it is our monument. By responses, individual and collective, to the marvelous suggestiveness of Darwin's inquiries and interpretations, the members of this Association during the last half century years, paying their truest tributes. More or less unconsciously, no doubt, but none the less genuinely, we have thus been doing honor to one of the greatest of intellectual leaders.

The magnitude of any moving force is measured scarcely less by the obstacles surmounted

and by the inertia overcome than by the positive momentum it generates. In the first decades of the great Darwinian movement in biology, the tribute of our members may not have been wanting in demonstrations of the force of old adhesions, but even then, whether by resistance or by coöperation, we gave our testimony to the new power that made itself felt in the scientific world. A little later we paid the tribute of conviction— the general tribute of willing conviction, on the part of some of us, and the even more significant tribute of reluctant conviction, on the part of others; but, in one way or another, we paid a universal tribute.

If we of the older school permit ourselves to be reminiscent, the tides of thought and feeling of the early days of the half century we celebrate easily surge back into consciousness. We readily recall the stirrings in the biological field when the great question of derivation of species arose into a concrete and, as it seemed to some, a threatening form. But it was not among us as biologists, but among us as members of a proud race, that emotion was deepest stirred. It was in the humanistic atmosphere that protests were most vibrant, for man-scientific man not excepted— is first of all a creature who takes thought of himself. His anthropic pride, fostered by traditional assumptions of separateness and eminent superiority-assumptions peculiar to no race, nation, or religion, but the common inheritance

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