THE PERIOD OF INCUBATION.
When Charles Darwin landed in England on his return from the voyage of
the 'Beagle' he was nearly twenty-eight. When he published the first
edition of the 'Origin of Species' he was over fifty. The intermediate
years, though much occupied by many minor works of deep specialist
scientific importance, were still mainly devoted to collecting material
for the one crowning effort of his life, the chief monument of his great
co-ordinating and commanding intellect--the settlement of the question
of organic evolution.
'There is one thing,' says Professor Fiske, 'which a man of original
scientific or philosophical genius in a rightly ordered world should
never be called upon to do. He should never be called upon to earn a
living; for that is a wretched waste of energy, in which the highest
intellectual power is sure to suffer serious detriment, and runs the
risk of being frittered away into hopeless ruin.' From this unhappy
necessity Charles Darwin, like his predecessor Lyell, was luckily free.
He settled down early in a home of his own, and worked away at his own
occupations, with no sordid need for earning the day's bread, but with
perfect leisure to carry out the great destiny for which the chances of
the universe had singled him out. His subsequent history is the history
of his wonderful and unique contributions to natural science.
The first thing to be done, of course, was the arrangement and
classification 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 'Zoology
of the Voyage of the "Beagle,"' the different parts of which were
undertaken by rising men of science of the highest distinction, under
Charles Darwin's own editorship. Sir Richard Owen took in hand the
fossil mammals; Waterhouse arranged their living allies; Gould discussed
the birds, Jenyns the fish, and Bell the amphibians and reptiles. In
this vast co-operative publication Darwin thus obtained the assistance
of many among the most competent specialists in the England of his day,
and learned to understand his own collections by the light thrown upon
them from the focussed lamps of the most minute technical learning. As
for the journal, it was originally published with the general account of
the cruise by Captain Fitzroy in 1839, but was afterwards set forth in a
separate form under the title of 'A Naturalist's Voyage Round the
World.'
But while Darwin was thus engaged in arranging and classifying the
animals and plants he had brought home with him, the germs of those
inquiring ideas about the origin of species which we have already
observed in his account of the voyage were quickening into fresh life
within him. As he ruminated at his leisure over the results of his
accumulations, he was beginning to work upon the great problem with the
definite and conscious resolution of solving it. 'On my return home, it
occurred to me,' he says, 'in 1837, that something might perhaps be made
out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all
sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five
years' work, I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up
some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the
conclusions that then seemed to me probable; from that period to the
present day [1859] I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that
I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them
to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.'
So Darwin wrote at fifty. The words are weighty and well worthy of
consideration. They give us in a nutshell the true secret of Darwin's
success in compelling the attention and assent of his contemporaries to
his completed theory. For speculations and hypotheses like those of
Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, however brilliant and luminous they may be,
the hard, dry, scientific mind cares as a rule less than nothing. Men of
genius and insight like Goethe and Oken may, indeed, seize greedily upon
the pregnant suggestion; their intellects are already attuned by nature
to its due reception and assimilation; but the mere butterfly-catchers
and plant-hunters of the world, with whom after all rests ultimately the
practical acceptance or rejection of such a theory, can only be
convinced by long and patient accumulations of facts, by infinite
instances and endless examples, by exhaustive surveys of the whole
field of nature in a thousand petty details piecemeal. They have to be
driven by repeated beating into the right path. Everywhere they fancy
they see the loophole of an objection, which must be carefully closed
beforehand against them with anticipatory argument, as we close hedges
by the wayside against the obtrusive donkey with a cautious bunch of
thorny brambles. Even if Charles Darwin had hit upon the fundamental
idea of natural selection, and had published it, as Wallace did, in the
form of a mere splendid _aperçu_, he would never have revolutionised the
world of biology. When the great discovery was actually promulgated, it
was easy enough to win the assent of philosophical thinkers like Herbert
Spencer; easy enough, even, to gain the ready adhesion of non-biological
but kindred minds, like Leslie Stephen's and John Morley's; those might
all, perhaps, have been readily convinced by far less heavy and crushing
artillery than that so triumphantly marshalled together in the 'Origin
of Species.' But in order to command the slow and grudging adhesion of
the rank and file of scientific workers, the 'hodmen of science,' as
Professor Huxley calls them, it was needful to bring together an
imposing array of closely serried facts, to secure every post in the
rear before taking a single step onward, and to bring to bear upon every
antagonist the exact form of argument with which he was already
thoroughly familiar. It was by carefully pursuing these safe and
cautious philosophical tactics that Charles Darwin gained his great
victory. Where others were pregnant, he was cogent. He met the
Dryasdusts of science on their own ground, and he put them fairly to
flight with their own weapons. More than that, he brought them all over
in the long run as deserters into his own camp, and converted them from
doubtful and suspicious foes into warm adherents of the evolutionary
banner.
Moreover, fortunately for the world, Darwin's own mind was essentially
one of the inductive type. If a great deductive thinker and speculator
like Herbert Spencer had hit upon the self-same idea of survival of the
fittest, he might have communicated it to a small following of receptive
disciples, who would have understood it and accepted it, on _a priori_
grounds alone, and gradually passed it on to the grades beneath them;
but he would never have touched the slow and cautious elephantine
intellect of the masses. The common run of mankind are not deductive;
they require to have everything made quite clear to them by example and
instance. The English intelligence in particular shows itself as a rule
congenitally incapable of appreciating the superior logical certitude of
the deductive method. Englishmen will not even believe that the square
on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the containing sides until
they have measured and weighed as well as they are able by rude
experimental devices a few selected pieces of rudely shaped rectangular
paper. It was a great gain, therefore, that the task of reconstructing
the course of organic evolution should fall to the lot of a highly
trained and masterly intelligence of the inductive order. Darwin had
first to convince himself, and then he could proceed to convince the
world. He set about the task with characteristic patience and
thoroughness. No man that ever lived possessed in a more remarkable
degree than he did the innate capacity for taking trouble. For five
years, as a mere preliminary, he accumulated facts in immense variety,
and then for the first time and in the vaguest possible way he--'allowed
himself to speculate.' That brings us down to the year 1842, when the
first notes of the 'Origin of Species' must have been tentatively
committed to paper. It was in 1859 that the first edition of the
complete work was given to the world. Compare this with the case of
Newton, who similarly kept his grand idea of gravitation for many years
in embryo, until more exact measurements of the moon's mass and distance
should enable him to verify it to his own satisfaction.
One other item of immense importance in the genesis of the full
Darwinian doctrine deserves mention here--I mean, the exact moment of
time occupied by Charles Darwin in the continuous history of scientific
thought. A generation or two earlier, in Erasmus Darwin's days, biology
had not yet arrived at the true classification of animals and plants
upon an essentially hereditary basis. The Linnæan arrangement, then
universally accepted, was wholly artificial in its main features; it
distributed species without regard to their fundamental likenesses of
structure and organisation. But the natural system of Jussieu and De
Candolle, by arranging plants into truly related groups, made possible
the proofs of an order of affiliation in the vegetable kingdom; while
Cuvier's similar reconstruction of the animal world gave a like foothold
to the evolutionary philosopher in the other great department of organic
nature. The recognition of kinship between the various members of the
same family necessarily preceded the establishment of a regular
genealogical theory of life in its entirety.
Though we are here concerned mainly with Charles Darwin the thinker and
writer--not with Charles Darwin the husband and father--a few words of
explanation as to his private life must necessarily be added at the
present point, before we pass on to consider the long, slow, and
cautious brewing of that wonderful work, the 'Origin of Species,' Darwin
returned home from the voyage of the 'Beagle' at the end of the year
1836. Soon after, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, no doubt
through the influence of his friend Lyell, who was quite enthusiastic
over his splendid geological investigations on the rate of elevation in
the Pampas and the Cordillera. Acting on Lyell's advice, too, he
determined to seek no official appointment, but to devote himself
entirely for the rest of his life to the pursuit of science. In 1838, at
the age of twenty-nine, he read before the Geological Society his paper
on the 'Connection of Volcanic Phenomena with the Elevation of Mountain
Chains,' when, says Lyell admiringly in a private letter, 'he opened
upon De la Beche, Phillips, and others'--the veterans of the
science--'his whole battery of the earthquakes and volcanoes of the
Andes.' Shortly after, the audacious young man was appointed secretary
to 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 to
himself a wife from one of the houses to which he himself owed no small
part of his conspicuous greatness. His choice fell upon his cousin,
Miss Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, of Maer Hall; and,
after three years of married life in London, he settled at last at Down
House, near Orpington, in Kent, where for the rest of his days he passed
his time among his conservatories and his pigeons, his garden and his
fowls, with his children growing up quietly beside him, and the great
thinking world of London within easy reach of a few minutes' journey.
His private means enabled him to live the pleasant life of an English
country gentleman, and devote himself unremittingly to the pursuit of
science. Ill health, indeed, interfered sadly with his powers of work;
but system and patience did wonders during his working days, which were
regularly parcelled out between study and recreation, and utilised and
economised in the very highest possible degree. Early to bed and early
to rise, wandering unseen among the lanes and paths, or riding slowly on
his favourite black cob, the great naturalist passed forty years happily
and usefully at Down, where all the village knew and loved him. A man of
singular simplicity and largeness of heart, Charles Darwin never really
learnt to know his own greatness. And that charming innocence and
ignorance of his real value made the value itself all the greater. His
moral qualities, indeed, were no less admirable and unique in their way
than his intellectual faculties. To that charming candour and delightful
unostentatiousness which everybody must have noticed in his published
writings, he united in private life a kindliness of disposition, a width
of sympathy, and a ready generosity which made him as much beloved by
his friends as he was admired and respected by all Europe. The very
servants who came beneath his roof stopped there for the most part
during their whole lifetime. In his earlier years at Down, the quiet
Kentish home was constantly enlivened by the visits of men like Lyell,
Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and Wollaston. During his later days, it was
the Mecca of a world-wide scientific and philosophic pilgrimage, where
all the greatest men our age has produced sought at times the rare
honour of sitting before the face of the immortal master. But to the
very last Darwin himself never seemed to discover that he was anything
more than just an average man of science among his natural peers.
Shortly after Darwin went to Down he began one long and memorable
experiment, which in itself casts a flood of light upon his patient and
painstaking method of inquiry. Two years before, he had read at the
Geological Society a paper on the 'Formation of Mould,' which more than
thirty years later he expanded into his famous treatise on the 'Action
of Earthworms.' His uncle and father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, suggested
to him that the apparent sinking of stones on the surface might really
be due to earthworm castings. So, as soon as he had some land of his own
to experiment upon, he began, in 1842, to spread broken chalk over a
field at Down, in which, twenty-nine years later, in 1871, a trench was
dug to test the results. What other naturalist ever waited so long and
so patiently to discover the upshot of a single experiment? Is it
wonderful that a man who worked like that should succeed, not by faith
but by logical power, in removing mountains?
Unfortunately, we do not know the exact date when Darwin first read
Malthus. But that the perusal of that remarkable book formed a crisis
and turning-point in his mental development we know from his own
distinct statement in a letter to Haeckel, prefixed to the brilliant
German evolutionist's 'History of Creation.' 'It seemed to me probable,'
says Darwin, speaking of his own early development, 'that allied species
were descended from a common ancestor. But during several years I could
not conceive how each form could have been modified so as to become
admirably adapted to its place in nature. I began therefore to study
domesticated animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceived
that man's power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals was
the most powerful of all means in the production of new races. Having
attended to the habits of animals and their relations to the surrounding
conditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle for existence to
which all organisms are subjected; and my geological observations had
allowed me to appreciate to a certain extent the duration of past
geological periods. With my mind thus prepared I fortunately happened to
read Malthus's "Essay on Population" and the idea of natural selection
through the struggle for existence at once occurred to me. Of all the
subordinate points in the theory, the last which I understood was the
cause of the tendency in the descendants from a common progenitor to
diverge in character.'
It is impossible, indeed, to overrate the importance of Malthus, viewed
as a schoolmaster to bring men to Darwin, and to bring Darwin himself to
the truth. Without the 'Essay on the Principle of Population' it is
quite conceivable that we should never have had the 'Origin of Species'
or the 'Descent of Man.'
At the same time, Darwin had not been idle in other departments of
scientific work. Side by side with his collections for his final effort
he had been busy on his valuable treatise upon Coral Reefs, in which he
proved, mainly from his own observations on the Keeling archipelago,
that atolls owe their origin to a subsidence of the supporting
ocean-floor, the rate of upward growth of the reefs keeping pace on the
whole with the gradual depression of the sea-bottom. 'No more admirable
example 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 of
investigators of nature.' But, from our present psychological and
historical point of view, as a moment in the development of Darwin's
influence, and therefore of the evolutionary impulse in general, it
possesses a still greater and more profound importance, because the work
in which the theory is unfolded forms a perfect masterpiece of thorough
and comprehensive inductive method, and gained for its author a
well-deserved reputation as a sound and sober scientific inquirer. The
acquisition of such a reputation, afterwards increased by the
publication of the monograph on the Family Cirripedia (in 1851), proved
of immense use to Charles Darwin in the fierce battle which was to rage
around the unconscious body of the 'Origin of Species.' To be 'sound' is
everywhere of incalculable value; to have approved oneself to the slow
and cautious intelligence of the Philistine classes is a mighty spear
and shield for a strong man; but in England, and above all in scientific
England, it is absolutely indispensable to the thinker who would
accomplish any great revolution. Soundness is to the world of science
what respectability is to the world of business--the _sine qua non_ for
successfully gaining even a hearing from established personages.
To read the book on Coral Reefs is indeed to take a lesson of the
deepest value in applied inductive canons. Every fact is duly
marshalled: every conclusion is drawn by the truest and most legitimate
process from careful observation or crucial experiment. Bit by bit,
Darwin shows most admirably that, through gradual submergence, fringing
reefs are developed into barrier-reefs, and these again into atolls or
lagoon islands; and incidentally he throws a vivid light on the slow
secular movements upward or downward for ever taking place in the
world's crust. But the value of the work as a geological record, great
as it is, is as nothing compared with its value as a training exercise
in inductive logic. Darwin was now learning by experience how to use his
own immense powers.
Meanwhile, the environment too had been gradually moving. In 1832, the
year after young Darwin set out upon his cruise, Lyell published the
first edition of his 'Principles of Geology,' establishing once for all
the uniformitarian concept of that branch of science. In 1836, the year
when he returned, Rafinesque, in his 'New Flora of North America,' had
accepted within certain cramping limits the idea that 'all species might
once have been varieties, and that many varieties are gradually becoming
species by assuming constant and peculiar characters.' Haldeman in
Boston, and Grant at University College, London, were teaching from
their professorial chairs the self-same novel and revolutionary
doctrine. At last, in 1844, Robert Chambers published anonymously his
famous and much-debated 'Vestiges of Creation,' which brought down the
question of evolution _versus_ creation from the senate of _savants_ to
the arena of the mere general public, and set up at once a universal
fever of inquiry into the mysterious question of the origin of species.
Chambers himself was a man rather of general knowledge and some native
philosophical insight than of any marked scientific accuracy or depth.
His work in its original form displayed comparatively little
acquaintance with the vast ground-work of the question at
issue--zoological, botanical, geological, and so forth--and in Charles
Darwin's own opinion showed 'a great want of scientific caution.' But
its graphic style, its vivid picturesqueness, and to the world at large
the startling novelty of its brilliant and piquant suggestions, made it
burst at once into an unwonted popularity for a work of so distinctly
philosophical a character. In nine years it leaped rapidly through no
less than ten successive editions, and remained until the publication of
the 'Origin of Species' the chief authoritative exponent in England of
the still struggling evolutionary principle.
The 'Vestiges of Creation' may be succinctly described as Lamarck and
water, the watery element being due in part to the unnecessary obtrusion
(_more Scotico_) of a metaphysical and theological principle into the
physical universe. Chambers himself, in his latest edition (before the
book was finally killed by the advent of Darwinism), thus briefly
describes his main concepts: 'The several series of animated beings,
from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are,
under the providence of God, the results, _first_, of an impulse which
has been imparted to the forms of life, advancing them, in definite
times, by generation, through grades of organisation, terminating in the
highest dicotyledons and vertebrata, these grades being few in number,
and generally marked by intervals of organic character, which we find to
be a practical difficulty in ascertaining affinities; _second_, of
another impulse connected with the vital forces, tending, in the course
of generations, to modify organic structures in accordance with external
circumstances, as food, the nature of the habitat, and the meteoric
agencies.' Now it is clear at once that these two supposed 'impulses'
are really quite miraculous in their essence. They do not help us at all
to a distinct physical and realisable conception of any natural agency
whereby species became differentiated one from the other. They lay the
whole burden of species-making upon a single primordial supernatural
impetus, imparted to the first living germ by the will of the Creator,
and acting ever since continuously it is true, but none the less
miraculously for all that. For many creations Chambers substitutes one
single long creative nisus: where Darwin saw natural selection, his
Scotch predecessor saw a _deus ex machina_, helping on the course of
organic development by a constant but unseen interference from above. He
supposed evolution to be predetermined by some intrinsic and externally
implanted proclivity. In short, Chambers's theory is Lamarck's
theologised, and spoilt in the process.
The book had nevertheless a most prodigious and perfectly unprecedented
success. The secret of its authorship was keenly debated and jealously
kept. The most ridiculous surmises as to its anonymous origin were
everywhere afloat. Some attributed it to Thackeray, and some to Prince
Albert, some to Lyell, some to Sir John Herschel, and some to Charles
Darwin himself. Obscurantists thought it a wicked book; 'intellectual'
people thought it an advanced book. As a matter of fact it was neither
the one nor the other. It was just a pale and colourless transcript of
the old familiar teleological Lamarckism. Yet it did good in its
generation. The public at large were induced by its ephemeral vogue to
interest themselves in a question to which they had never previously
given even a passing thought, though more practised biologists of
evolutionary tendencies were grieved at heart that evolution should
first have been popularly presented to the English world under so
unscientific, garbled, and mutilated a form. From the philosophic side,
Herbert Spencer found 'this ascription of organic evolution to some
aptitude naturally possessed by organisms or miraculously imposed upon
them' to be 'one of those explanations which explain nothing--a shaping
of ignorance into the semblance of knowledge. The cause assigned,' he
says, 'is not a true cause--not a cause assimilable to known causes--not
a cause that can be anywhere shown to produce analogous effects. It is a
cause unrepresentable in thought: one of those illegitimate symbolic
conceptions which cannot by any mental process be elaborated into a real
conception.' From the scientific side, on the other hand, Darwin felt
sadly the inaccuracy and want of profound technical knowledge everywhere
displayed by the anonymous author. These things might naturally cause
the enemy to blaspheme. No worse calamity, indeed, can happen to a
great truth than for its defence to be intrusted to inefficient hands.
Nevertheless, long after, in the 'Origin of Species,' the great
naturalist wrote with generous appreciation of the 'Vestiges of
Creation,' 'In my own opinion it has done excellent service in this
country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and
in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.'
Still Darwin gave no sign. A flaccid, cartilaginous, unphilosophic
evolutionism had full possession of the field for the moment, and
claimed, as it were, to be the genuine representative of the young and
vigorous biological creed, while he himself was in truth the real heir
to all the honours of the situation. He was in possession of the
master-key which alone could unlock the bars that opposed the progress
of evolution, and still he waited. He could afford to wait. He was
diligently collecting, amassing, investigating; eagerly reading every
new systematic work, every book of travels, every scientific journal,
every record of sport, or exploration, or discovery, to extract from the
dead mass of undigested fact whatever item of implicit value might swell
the definite co-ordinated series of notes in his own commonplace books
for the now distinctly contemplated 'Origin of Species.' His way was to
make all sure behind him, to summon up all his facts in irresistible
array, and never to set out upon a public progress until he was secure
against all possible attacks of the ever-watchful and alert enemy in the
rear. Few men would have had strength of mind enough to resist the
temptation offered by the publication of the 'Vestiges of Creation,' and
the extraordinary success attained by so flabby a presentation of the
evolutionary case: Darwin resisted it, and he did wisely.
We may, however, take it for granted, I doubt not, that it was the
appearance and success of Chambers's invertebrate book which induced
Darwin, in 1844 (the year of its publication), to enlarge his short
notes 'into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed to him
probable.' This sketch he showed to Dr. (now Sir Joseph) Hooker, no
doubt as a precaution to ensure his own claim of priority against any
future possible competitor. And having thus eased his mind for the
moment, he continued to observe, to read, to devour 'Transactions,' to
collate instances, with indefatigable persistence for fifteen years
longer. If any man mentally measures out fifteen years of his own life,
and bethinks him of how long a space it seems when thus deliberately
pictured, he will be able to realise a little more definitely--but only
a little--how profound was the patience, the self-denial, the
single-mindedness of Darwin's intense search after the ultimate truths
of natural science.
What was the sketch that he thus committed to paper in 1844, and
submitted to the judgment of his friend Hooker? It was the germ of the
theory of natural selection. According to that theory, organic
development is due to the survival of the fittest among innumerable
variations, good, bad, and indifferent, from one or more parent stocks.
Darwin's reading of Malthus had suggested to him (apparently as early as
the date of publication of the 'Naturalist's Journal') the idea that
every species of plant and animal must always be producing a far greater
number of seeds, eggs, germs, or young offspring than could possibly be
needed for the maintenance of the average number of the species. Of
these young, by far the greater number must always perish from
generation to generation, for want of space, of food, of air, of raw
material. The survivors in each brood must be those naturally best
adapted for survival. The many would be eaten, starved, overrun, or
crowded out; the few that survive would be those that possessed any
special means of defence against aggressors, any special advantage for
escaping starvation, any special protection against overrunning or
overcrowding foes. Animals and plants, Darwin found on inquiry and
investigation, tended to vary under diverse circumstances from the
parent or parents that originally produced them. These variations were
usually infinitesimal in amount, but sometimes more considerable or even
striking. If any particular variation tended in any way to preserve the
life of the creatures that exhibited it, beyond the average of their
like competitors, that variation would in the long run survive, and the
individuals that possessed it, being thus favoured in the struggle for
existence, would replace the less adapted form from which they sprang.
Darwinism is Malthusianism on the large scale: it is the application of
the calculus of population to the wide facts of universal life.
In one sense, indeed, it may be said that, given Malthus on the one hand
and the Lamarckian evolutionism on the other, some great man somewhere
must sooner or later, almost of necessity, have combined the two, and
hit out the doctrine of natural selection as we actually know it. Quite
so; but then the point is just this: Darwin _was_ the great man in
question; he _did_ the work which in the very essence of things some
such great man was naturally and inevitably predestined to do. You can
always easily manage to get on without any particular great man,
provided, of course, you have ready to hand another equally able great
man by whom to replace him in the scheme of existence. But how many
ordinary naturalists possess the width of mind and universality of
interest which would prompt them to read, mark, learn, and inwardly
digest a politico-economical treatise of the calibre of Malthus? How
many, having done so, have the keenness of vision to perceive the
ensuing biological implications? How many, having seen them, have the
skill and the patience to work up the infinite chaos of botanical and
zoological detail into the far-reaching generalisations of the 'Origin
of Species'? Merely to have caught at the grand idea is in itself no
small achievement; others did so and deserve all honour for their
insight; but to flesh it out with all the minute care and conclusive
force of Darwin's masterpiece is a thousand times a greater and nobler
monument of human endeavour.
During the fifteen years from 1844 to 1859, however, Darwin's pen was by
no means idle. In the first-named year he published his 'Geological
Observations on Volcanic Islands'--part of the 'Beagle' exploration
series; in 1846 he followed this up by his 'Geological Observations on
South America;' in 1851 he gave to the world his monograph on 'Recent
Barnacles;' and in 1853, his treatise on the fossil species of the same
family. But all these works of restricted interest remained always
subsidiary to the one great central task of his entire lifetime, the
preparation of his projected volume on the Origin of Species.
All through the middle decades of the century Darwin continued to labour
at his vast accumulation of illustrative facts; and side by side with
his continuous toil, outside opinion kept paving the way for the final
acceptance of his lucid ideas. The public was buying and reading all the
time its ten editions of the 'Vestiges of Creation.' It was slowly
digesting Lyell's 'Principles of Geology,' in which the old cataclysmic
theories were featly demolished, and the uniformitarian conception of a
past gradually and insensibly merging into the present was conclusively
established. It was getting accustomed to statements like those of the
younger St. Hilaire, in 1850, that specific characters may be modified
by changes in the environing conditions, and that the modifications thus
produced may often be of generic value--may make a difference so great
that we must regard the product not merely as belonging to a distinct
species, but even to a distinct genus or higher kind. In 1852 Herbert
Spencer published in the 'Leader' his remarkable essay, contrasting the
theories of creation and evolution, as applied to organic beings, with
all the biting force of his profound intelligence; and in 1855, the same
encyclopædic philosopher put forth the first rough sketch of his
'Principles of Psychology,' in which he took the lead in treating the
phenomena of mind from the point of view of gradual development. In that
extraordinary work, the philosopher of evolution traced the origin of
all mental powers and faculties by slow gradations from the very
simplest subjective elements. The 'Principles of Psychology' preceded
the 'Origin of Species' by nearly five years; the first collected volume
of Mr. Spencer's essays preceded Darwin's work by some twelve months.
Baden-Powell's essay on the 'Philosophy of Creation' (much debated and
condemned in ecclesiastical circles), and Professor Owen's somewhat
contradictory utterances on the nature of types and archetypal ideas,
also helped to keep alive interest in the problem of origins up to the
very moment of the final appearance of Darwin's great and splendid
solution.
It is interesting during these intermediate years to watch from time to
time the occasional side-hints of Darwin's activity and of the interest
it aroused among his scientific contemporaries. In 1854, for example,
Sir Charles Lyell notes, after an evening at Darwin's, how Sir Joseph
Hooker 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 many
other "ugly facts," as Hooker, clinging like me to the orthodox faith,
calls these and other abnormal vagaries.' On a similar occasion, a
little later, Lyell asks, after meeting 'Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston
at Darwin's,' 'After all, did we not come from an ourang?' Last of all,
in 1857, Darwin himself writes an anticipatory letter to his American
friend, Asa Gray, in which he mentions 'six points'--the cardinal
conceptions of the 'Origin of Species.' His book is now fairly under
weigh; he speaks of it himself to acquaintance and correspondents as an
acknowledged project.
Events were growing ripe for the birth. A lucky accident precipitated
its parturition in the course of the year 1858.