CHARLES DARWIN
BY
GRANT ALLEN
ENGLISH WORTHIES
EDITED BY ANDREW LANG
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1885
PREFACE
In this little volume I have endeavoured to present the life and work of
Charles Darwin viewed as a moment in a great revolution, in due relation
both to those who went before and to those who come after him.
Recognising, as has been well said, that the wave makes the crest, not
the crest the wave, I have tried to let my hero fall naturally into his
proper place in a vast onward movement of the human intellect, of which
he was himself at once a splendid product and a moving cause of the
first importance. I have attempted to show him both as receiving the
torch from Lamarck and Malthus, and as passing it on with renewed
brilliancy to the wide school of evolutionary thinkers whom his work was
instrumental in arousing to fresh and vigorous activity along a thousand
separate and varied lines of thought and action.
As Mr. Francis Darwin was already engaged upon a life of his father, I
should have shrunk from putting forth my own little book if I had not
succeeded in securing beforehand his kind sanction. That sanction,
however, was at once so frankly and cordially given, that all my
hesitation upon such a score was immediately laid aside; and as I have
necessarily had to deal rather with Darwin's position as a thinker and
worker than with the biographical details of his private life, I trust
the lesser book may not clash with the greater, but to some extent may
supplement and even illustrate it.
Treating my subject mainly as a study in the interaction of organism and
environment, it has been necessary for me frequently to introduce the
names of living men of science side by side with some of those who have
more or less recently passed away from among us. For uniformity's sake,
as well as for brevity's, I have been compelled, in every instance
alike, to omit the customary conventional handles. I trust those who
thus find themselves docked of their usual titles of respect will kindly
remember that the practice is in fact adopted _honoris causâ_; they are
paying prematurely the usual penalty of intellectual greatness.
My obligations to Professor Huxley, to Professor Fiske, to Mr. Herbert
Spencer, to Professor Sachs, to Hermann Müller, to Dr. Krause, to
Charles Darwin himself, and to many other historians and critics of
evolutionism, will be sufficiently obvious to all instructed readers,
and are for the most part fully acknowledged already in the text. It
would be absurd to overload so small and popularly written a book with
references and authorities. I hope, therefore, that any other writers to
whom I may inadvertently have neglected to confess my debts will kindly
rest satisfied with this general acknowledgment. There are, however,
three persons in particular from whom I have so largely borrowed facts
or 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 Archaeological Society,' I have taken
much interesting information about my hero's immediate ancestry and
early days. From Mr. Samuel Butler, the author of 'Evolution Old and
New,' I have derived many pregnant suggestions with regard to the true
position and meaning of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and the early
essentially teleological evolutionists--suggestions which I am all the
more anxious to acknowledge since I differ fundamentally from Mr. Butler
in his estimate of the worth of Charles Darwin's distinctive discovery
of natural selection. Finally, to Mr. Bates, the 'Naturalist on the
Amazons,' I am indebted for several valuable items of information as to
the general workings of the pre-Darwinian evolutionary spirit.
In a book dealing so largely with a contemporary movement, the history
of which has never yet been consecutively written down in full, or
subjected as a whole to searching criticism, there must probably be many
errors of detail, which can hardly be avoided under such circumstances.
I have endeavoured to minimise them as far as possible. For those which
may have escaped my own scrutiny I must trust both for correction and
for indulgence to the kindness of my readers.
CONTENTS
I. THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN
II. CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS
III. EARLY DAYS
IV. DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS
V. THE PERIOD OF INCUBATION
VI. THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
VII. THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS
VIII. THE DESCENT OF MAN
IX. THE THEORY OF COURTSHIP
X. VICTORY AND REST
XI. DARWIN'S PLACE IN THE EVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT
XII. THE NET RESULT
INDEX
CHARLES DARWIN.
CHAPTER I.
THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN.
Charles Darwin was a great man, and he accomplished a great work. The
Newton of biology, he found the science of life a chaotic maze; he left
it an orderly system, with a definite plan and a recognisable meaning.
Great men are not accidents; great works are not accomplished in a
single day. Both are the product of adequate causes. The great man
springs from an ancestry competent to produce him; he is the final
flower and ultimate outcome of converging hereditary forces, that
culminate at last in the full production of his splendid and exceptional
personality. The great work which it is his mission to perform in the
world is never wholly of his own inception. It also is the last effect
of antecedent conditions, the slow result of tendencies and ideas long
working unseen or but little noticed beneath the surface of opinion, yet
all gradually conspiring together towards the definitive revolution at
whose head, in the fulness of time, the as yet unborn genius is destined
to place himself. This is especially the case with those extraordinary
waves of mental upheaval, one of which gave us the Italian renaissance,
and another of which is actually in progress around us at the present
day. They have their sources deep down in the past of human thought and
human feeling, and they are themselves but the final manifestation of
innumerable energies which have long been silently agitating the souls
of nations in their profoundest depths.
Thus, every great man may be regarded as possessing two distinct lines
of ancestry, physical and spiritual, each of which separately demands
elucidation. He owes much in one way to his father and his mother, his
grandfathers and his grandmothers, and his remoter progenitors, from
some or all of whom he derives, in varying degrees and combinations, the
personal qualities whose special interaction constitutes his greatness
and his idiosyncrasy; he owes much in another way to his intellectual
and moral ancestors, the thinkers and workers who have preceded him in
his own department of thought or action, and have made possible in the
course of ages the final development of his special revolution or his
particular system. Viewed as an individual, he is what he is, with all
his powers and faculties and potentialities, in virtue of the brain, the
frame, the temperament, the energy he inherits directly from his actual
ancestors, paternal and maternal; viewed as a factor or element in a
great movement, he is what he is because the movement had succeeded in
reaching such and such a point in its progress already without him, and
waited only for such and such a grand and commanding personality in
order to carry it yet a step further on its course of development.
No man who ever lived would more cordially have recognised these two
alternative aspects of the great worker's predetermining causes than
Charles Darwin. He knew well that the individual is the direct
cumulative product of his physical predecessors, and that he works and
is worked upon in innumerable ways by the particular environment into
whose midst he is born. Let us see, then, in his own case what were
these two main sets of conditioning circumstances which finally led up
to the joint production of Charles Darwin, the man and the philosopher,
the thinking brain and the moving energy. In other words, what was the
state of the science of life at the time when he first began to observe
and to speculate; and what was the ancestry which made him be born a
person capable of helping it forward at a single bound over its great
restricting dogmatic barrier of the fixity of species?
Let us begin, in the first place, by clearing the path beforehand of a
popular misconception, so extremely general and almost universal that,
unless it be got rid of at the very outset of our sketch, much of the
real scope and purport of Darwin's life and work must, of necessity,
remain entirely misunderstood by the vast mass of English readers. In
the public mind Darwin is, perhaps, most commonly regarded as the
discoverer and founder of the evolution hypothesis. Two ideas are
usually associated with his name and memory. It is believed that he was
the first propounder of the theory which supposes all plant and animal
forms to be the result, not of special creation, but of slow
modification in pre-existent organisms. It is further and more
particularly believed that he was the first propounder of the theory
which supposes the descent of man to be traceable from a remote and more
or less monkey-like ancestor. Now, as a matter of fact, Darwin was not
the prime originator of either of these two great cardinal ideas. Though
he held both as part of his organised theory of things, he was not by
any means the first or the earliest thinker to hold them or to propound
them publicly. Though he gained for them both a far wider and more
general acceptance than they had ever before popularly received, he laid
no sort of claim himself to originality or proprietorship in either
theory. The grand idea which he did really originate was not the idea of
'descent with modification,' but the idea of 'natural selection,' by
which agency, as he was the first to prove, definite kinds of plants and
animals have been slowly evolved from simpler forms, with definite
adaptations to the special circumstances by which they are surrounded.
In a word, it was the peculiar glory of Charles Darwin, not to have
suggested that all the variety of animal and vegetable life might have
been produced by slow modifications in one or more original types, but
to have shown the nature of the machinery by which such a result could
be actually attained in the practical working out of natural causes. He
did not invent the development theory, but he made it believable and
comprehensible. He was not, as most people falsely imagine, the Moses of
evolutionism, the prime mover in the biological revolution; he was the
Joshua who led the world of thinkers and workers into full fruition of
that promised land which earlier investigators had but dimly descried
from the Pisgah-top of conjectural speculation.
How far Darwin's special idea of natural selection supplemented and
rendered credible the earlier idea of descent with modification we shall
see more fully when we come to treat of the inception and growth of his
great epoch-making work, 'The Origin of Species;' for the present, it
must suffice to point out that in the world into which he was born, the
theory of evolution already existed in a more or less shadowy and
undeveloped shape. And since it was his task in life to raise this
theory from the rank of a mere plausible and happy guess to the rank of
a highly elaborate and almost universally accepted biological system, we
may pause awhile to consider on the threshold what was the actual state
of natural science at the moment when the great directing and organising
intelligence of Charles Darwin first appeared.
From time immemorial, in modern Christendom at least, it had been the
general opinion of learned and simple alike that every species of plant
or animal owed its present form and its original existence to a distinct
act of special creation. This _naïf_ belief, unsupported as it was by
any sort of internal evidence, was supposed to rest directly upon the
express authority of a few obscure statements in the Book of Genesis.
The Creator, it was held, had in the beginning formed each kind after a
particular pattern, had endowed it with special organs devised with
supreme wisdom for subserving special functions, and had bestowed upon
it the mystical power of reproducing its like in its own image to all
generations. No variation of importance ever occurred within the types
thus constituted; all plants and animals always retained their special
forms unaltered in any way from era to era. This is the doctrine of the
fixity and immutability of species, almost universal in the civilised
world up to the end of the last century.
Improbable as such a crude idea now seems to any person even moderately
acquainted with the extraordinary variety and variability of living
forms, it nevertheless contained nothing at all likely to contradict the
ordinary experience of the everyday observer in the last century. The
handful of plants and animals with which he was personally acquainted
consisted for the most part of a few large, highly advanced, and
well-marked forms, not in the least liable to be mistaken for one
another even by the most hasty and casual spectator. A horse can
immediately be discriminated by the naked eye from a donkey, and a cow
from a sheep, without risk of error; nobody is likely to confuse wheat
with barley, or to hesitate between classing any given fruit that is
laid before him as a pear or an apple, a plum or a nectarine.
Variability seldom comes under the notice of the ordinary passing
spectator as it does under that of the prying and curious scientific
observer; 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 superficial
view as a mere result of human selection or of deliberate mongrel
interbreeding. To the eye of the average man, all the living objects
ordinarily perceived in external nature fall at once under certain fixed
and recognisable kinds, as dogs and horses, elms and ashes, whose limits
he is never at all inclined to confound in any way one with the other.
Linnæus, the great father of modern scientific biology, had frankly and
perhaps unthinkingly accepted this current and almost universal dogma of
the fixity and immutability of species. Indeed, by defining a kind as a
group of plants or animals so closely resembling one another as to give
rise to the belief that they might all be descended from a single
ancestor or pair of ancestors, he implicitly gave the new sanction of
his weighty authority to the creation hypothesis, and to the prevalent
doctrine of the unchangeability of organic forms. To Linnæus, the
species into which he mapped out all the plants and animals then known,
appeared as the descendants each of a solitary progenitor or of a
primitive couple, called into existence at the beginning of all things
by the direct fiat of a designing Creator. He saw the world of organic
life as composed of so many well-demarcated types, each separate,
distinct, and immutable, each capable of producing its like _ad
infinitum_, and each unable to vary from its central standard in any of
its individuals, except perhaps within very narrow and unimportant
limits.
But towards the close of the eighteenth century, side by side with the
general awakening of the human intellect and the arrival of a new era of
free social investigation, which culminated in a fresh order of things,
there was developed a more critical and sceptical attitude in the world
of science, which soon produced a notable change of front among thinking
naturalists as to the origin and meaning of specific distinctions.
Buffon was the first great biological innovator who ventured, in very
doubtful and tentative language, to suggest the possibility of the rise
of species from one another by slow modification of ancestral forms.
Essentially a popular essayist, writing in the volcanic
priest-suppressed France of the _ancien régime_, during the inconsistent
days of Louis XV. and Louis XVI., when it was uncertain whether novel
and heterodox opinions would bring down upon their author fame and
reputation or the Sorbonne and the Bastille, Buffon was careful to put
his conjectural conclusions in a studiously guarded and often even
ironical form. But time after time, in his great discursive work, the
'Histoire Naturelle' (published in successive volumes between 1749 and
1788), he recurs anew to the pregnant suggestion that plants and animals
may not be bound by fixed and immovable limits of species, but may
freely vary in every direction from a common centre, so that one kind
may gradually and slowly be evolved by natural causes from the type of
another. He points out that, underlying all external diversities of
character and shape, fundamental likenesses of type occur in many
animals, which irresistibly suggest the novel notion of common descent
from a single ancestor. Thus regarded, he says, not only the ass and the
horse (to take a particular passage) but even man himself, the monkeys,
the quadrupeds, and all vertebrate animals, might be viewed as merely
forming divergent branches of one and the same great family tree. Every
such family, he believed, whether animal or vegetable, might have sprung
originally from a single stock, which after many generations had here
developed into a higher form, and there degenerated into a lower and
less perfect type of organisation. Granting this--granting that nature
could by slow variation produce one species in the course of direct
descent from another unlike it (for example, the ass from the horse),
then, Buffon observed, there was no further limit to be set to her
powers in this respect, and we might reasonably conclude that from a
single primordial being she has gradually been able in the course of
time to develop the whole continuous gamut of existing animal and
vegetable life. To be sure, Buffon always saves himself from censure by
an obvious afterthought--'But no; it is certain from revelation that
every species was directly created by a separate fiat.' This
half-hearted and somewhat subrisive denial, however, must be taken
merely as a concession to the Sorbonne and to the fashionable exegesis
of his own day; and, even so, the Sorbonne was too much in the end for
the philosophic thinker. He had once in his life at least to make his
submission and demand pardon from the offended orthodoxy of the Paris
faculty.
The wave of thought and feeling, thus apologetically and tentatively
stirred on the unruffled pond of eighteenth century opinion by the
startling plop of Buffon's little smooth-cut pebble, soon widened out on
every side in concentric circles, and affected with its wash the entire
world of biological science in every country. Before the close of the
eighteenth century speculation as to the origin of species was rife in
all quarters of Europe. In France itself, Geoffroy St. Hilaire,
constitutionally cautious and undecided, but wide of view and free from
prejudice, came slowly to the conclusion, in 1795, that all species are
really derived by modification from one or more primitive types. In
Germany, in the very same year, Goethe, with the keen vision of the
poet and the calm eye of the philosopher uniquely combined, discerned
independently as by a lightning flash the identical idea of the origin
of kinds by modification of pre-existent organisms. 'We may assert
without 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 one
original type, which still daily changes and modifies its form by
propagation.' 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 only
adopted Buffon's theory of the origin of species by evolution, but also
laid down as the chief cause of such development the actions and needs
of the animals themselves. According to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, animals came
to vary from one another chiefly because they were always altering their
habits and voluntarily accommodating themselves to new actions and
positions in life. His work produced comparatively little effect upon
the world at large in his own time, but it had immense influence upon
the next great prophet of evolution, Lamarck, and through Lamarck on
Lyell, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the modern school of
evolutionists generally. We shall consider his views in greater detail
when we pass from the spiritual to the physical antecedents of Charles
Darwin.
It was in 1801 that Lamarck first gave to the world his epoch-making
speculations and suggestions on the origin of species; and from that
date to the day of his death, in 1831, the unwearied old philosopher
continued 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 and
D'Alembert, with something of the vivid Celtic poetic imagination, and a
fearless habit of forming his own conclusions irrespective of common or
preconceived ideas, Lamarck went to the very root of the matter in the
most determined fashion, and openly proclaimed in the face of frowning
officialism under the Napoleonic reaction his profound conviction that
all species, including man, were descended by modification from one or
more primordial forms. In Charles Darwin's own words, 'He first did the
eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change,
in the organic as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of
law and not of miraculous interposition. Lamarck seems to have been
chiefly led to his conclusion on the gradual change of species by the
difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, by the almost
perfect gradation of forms in certain groups, and by the analogy of
domestic productions. With respect to the means of modification, he
attributed something to the direct action of the physical conditions of
life, something to the crossing of already existing forms, and much to
use and disuse, that is, to the effects of habit. To this latter agency
he seems to attribute all the beautiful adaptations in nature--such as
the long neck of the giraffe for browsing on the branches of trees,' He
believed, in short, that animals had largely developed themselves, by
functional effort followed by increased powers and abilities.
Lamarck's great work, the 'Philosophie Zoologique,' though opposed by
the austere and formal genius of the immortal Cuvier--a reactionary
biological conservative and obscurantist, equal to the enormous task of
mapping out piecemeal with infinite skill and power the separate
provinces of his chosen science, but incapable of taking in all the
bearings of the whole field at a single vivid and comprehensive
sweep--Lamarck's great work produced a deep and lasting impression upon
the entire subsequent course of evolutionary thought in scientific
Europe. True, owing to the retrograde tendencies of the First Empire, it
caused but little immediate stir at the precise moment of its first
publication; but the seed it sowed sank deep, and, lying fallow long in
men's minds, bore fruit at last in the next generation with the
marvellous fecundity of the germs of genius. Indeed, from the very
beginning of the present century, a ferment of inquiry on the subject of
creation and evolution was everywhere obvious among speculative
thinkers. The profound interest which Goethe took in the dispute on this
very subject in the French Académie des Sciences between Cuvier and
Geoffroy St. Hilaire, amid the thundering guns of a threatened European
convulsion, was but a solitary symptom of the general stir which
preceded the gestation and birth of the Darwinian hypothesis. It is
impossible to take up any scientific memoirs or treatises of the first
half of our own century without seeing at a glance how every mind of
high original scientific importance was permeated and disturbed by the
fundamental questions aroused, but not fully answered, by Buffon,
Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. In Lyell's letters and in Agassiz's
lectures, in the 'Botanic Journal' and the 'Philosophical
Transactions,' in treatises on Madeira beetles and the Australian flora,
we find everywhere the thoughts of men profoundly influenced in a
thousand directions by this universal evolutionary solvent and leaven.
And while the world of thought was thus seething and moving restlessly
before the wave of ideas set in motion by these various independent
philosophers, another group of causes in another field was rendering
smooth the path beforehand for the future champion of the amended
evolutionism. Geology on the one hand and astronomy on the other were
making men's minds gradually familiar with the conception of slow
natural development, as opposed to immediate and miraculous creation.
The rise of geology had been rapid and brilliant. In the last century it
had been almost universally believed that fossil organisms were the
relics of submerged and destroyed worlds, strange remnants of successive
terrible mundane catastrophes. Cuvier himself, who had rendered immense
services to geological science by his almost unerring reconstructions of
extinct animals, remained a partisan of the old theory of constant
cataclysms and fresh creations throughout his whole life; but Lamarck,
here as elsewhere the prophet of the modern uniformitarian concept of
nature, had already announced his grand idea that the ordinary process
of natural laws sufficed to account for all the phenomena of the earth's
crust. In England, William Smith, the ingenious land surveyor, riding up
and down on his daily task over the face of the country, became
convinced by his observations in the first years of the present century
that a fixed order of sequence could everywhere be traced among the
various superincumbent geological strata. Modern scientific geology
takes its rise from the moment of this luminous and luminiferous
discovery. With astonishing rapidity the sequence of strata was
everywhere noted, and the succession of characteristic fossils mapped
out, with the result of showing, however imperfectly at first, that the
history of organic life upon the globe had followed a slow and regular
course of constant development. Immediately whole schools of eager
workers employed themselves in investigating in separate detail the
phenomena of these successive stages of unfolding life. Murchison, fresh
from the Peninsular campaign, began to study the dawn of organic history
in the gloom of the Silurian and Cambrian epochs. A group of less
articulate but not less active workers like Buckland and Mantell
performed similar services for the carboniferous, the wealden, and the
tertiary deposits. Sedgwick endeavoured to co-ordinate the whole range
of then known facts into a single wide and comprehensive survey. De La
Beche, Phillips, and Agassiz added their share to the great work of
reconstruction. Last of all, among those who were contemporary and all
but coeval with Charles Darwin himself, Lyell boldly fought out the
battle of 'uniformitarianism,' proving, with all the accumulated weight
of his encyclopædic and world-wide knowledge, that every known feature
of geological development could be traced to the agency of causes now in
action, and illustrated by means of slow secular changes still actually
taking place on earth before our very eyes.
The influence of these novel conceptions upon the growth and spread of
evolutionary ideas was far-reaching and twofold. In the first place, the
discovery 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 of
their direct descent one from the other. In the second place, the
discovery that geological formations were not really separated each from
its predecessor by violent revolutions, but were the result of gradual
and ordinary changes, discredited the old idea of frequent fresh
creations after each catastrophe, and familiarised the minds of men of
science with the alternative notion of slow and natural evolutionary
processes. 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 same
direction. Kant, whose supereminent fame as a philosopher has almost
overshadowed his just claims as a profound thinker in physical science,
had already in the third quarter of the eighteenth century arrived at
his sublime nebular hypothesis, in which he suggested the possible
development of stars, suns, planets, and satellites by the slow
contraction of very diffuse and incandescent haze-clouds. This
magnificent cosmical conception was seized and adapted by the genius of
Laplace in his celestial system, and made familiar through his great
work to thinking minds throughout the whole of Europe. In England it was
further modified and remodelled by Sir William Herschel, whose period of
active investigation coincided in part with Charles Darwin's early
boyhood. The bearings of the nebular hypothesis upon the rise of
Darwinian evolutionism are by no means remote: the entire modern
scientific movement forms, in fact, a single great organic whole, of
which the special doctrine of biological development is but a small
separate integral part. All the theories and doctrines which go to make
it up display the one common trait that they reject the idea of direct
creative interposition from without, and attribute the entire existing
order of nature to the regular unfolding of one undeviating continuous
law.
Yet another factor in the intellectual stir and bustle of the time must
needs be mentioned even in so short and cursory a sketch as this of the
causes which led to the Darwinian crisis. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, a
clergyman of the Church of England, published the first edition of his
famous and much-debated 'Essay on the Principle of Population.' Malthus
was the first person who ever called public attention to the tendency of
population to increase up to the utmost limit of subsistence, as well as
to the necessary influence of starvation in checking its further
development beyond that point. Though his essay dealt only with the
question of reproduction in human societies, it was clear that it
possessed innumerable analogies in every domain of animal and vegetable
life. The book ran through many successive editions with extraordinary
rapidity for a work of its class, it was fiercely attacked and bravely
defended, it caused an immense amount of discussion and debate, and
besides its marvellous direct influence as a germinal power upon the
whole subsequent course of politico-economical and sociological thought,
it produced also a remarkable indirect influence on the side current of
biological and speculative opinion. In particular, as we shall more
fully see hereafter, it had an immediate effect in suggesting to the
mind of the great naturalist who forms our present subject the embryo
idea of 'natural selection.'
Such then was the intellectual and social world into which, early in the
present century, Charles Darwin found himself born. Everywhere around
him in his childhood and youth these great but formless evolutionary
ideas were brewing and fermenting. The scientific society of his elders
and of the contemporaries among whom he grew up was permeated with the
leaven of Laplace and of Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel. Inquiry was
especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific
distinctions among plants and animals. Those who believed in the
doctrine of Buffon and of the 'Zoonomia' and those who disbelieved in
it, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the
far-reaching implications of that fundamental problem. On every side
evolutionism, in its crude form, was already in the air. Long before
Charles Darwin himself published his conclusive 'Origin of Species,'
every thinking mind in the world of science, elder and younger, was
deeply engaged upon the self-same problem. Lyell and Horner in alternate
fits were doubting and debating. Herbert Spencer had already frankly
accepted the new idea with the profound conviction of _a priori_
reasoning. Agassiz was hesitating and raising difficulties. Treviranus
was ardently proclaiming his unflinching adhesion. Oken was spinning in
metaphysical Germany his fanciful parodies of the Lamarckian
hypothesis. Among the depths of Brazilian forests Bates was reading the
story of evolution on the gauze-like wings of tropical butterflies.
Under the scanty shade of Malayan palm-trees Wallace was independently
spelling out in rude outline the very theory of survival of the fittest,
which Charles Darwin himself was simultaneously perfecting and polishing
among the memoirs and pamphlets of his English study. Wollaston in
Madeira was pointing out the strange adaptations of the curious local
snails and beetles. Von Buch in the Canaries was coming to the
conclusion 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 Charles
Darwin was twenty, Dean Herbert had declared from the profound depth of
his horticultural knowledge that kinds were only mere fixed sports; and
Patrick Matthew, in the appendix to a work on 'Naval Timber,' had
casually developed, without perceiving its importance, the actual
distinctive Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. Robert Chambers
published in 1844 his 'Vestiges of Creation,' in which Lamarck's theory
was 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 and
unscientific thinkers.
This general attitude of interest and inquiry is of deep importance to
the proper comprehension of Charles Darwin's life and work, and that for
two distinct reasons. In the first place, the universal stir and deep
prying into evolutionary questions which everywhere existed among
scientific men in his early days was naturally communicated to a lad
born of a scientific family, and inheriting directly in blood and bone
the biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus Darwin. In the second
place, the existence of such a deep and wide-spread curiosity as to
ultimate origins, and the common prevalence of profound uniformitarian
and evolutionary views among philosophers and thinkers, made the
acceptance of Charles Darwin's particular theory, when it at last
arrived, a comparatively easy and certain matter, because by it the
course of organic development was assimilated, on credible grounds, to
the course of all other development in general, as then already widely
recognised. The first consideration helps us to account in part for the
man himself; the second consideration helps us even more to account for
the great work which he was enabled in the end so successfully to
accomplish.