VICTORY AND REST.
The last eleven years of Darwin's life were spent in enforcing and
developing the principles already reached, and in enjoying the almost
unchequered progress of the revolution he had so unconsciously to
himself succeeded in inaugurating.
Only one year elapsed between the publication of the 'Descent of Man'
and that of its next important successor, the 'Expression of the
Emotions.' The occasion of this learned and bulky treatise in itself
stands as an immortal proof of the conscientious way in which Darwin
went to work to anticipate the slightest and most comparatively
impertinent possible objections to his main theories. Sir Charles Bell,
in one of the quaintly antiquated Bridgwater treatises--those marvellous
monuments of sadly misplaced teleological ingenuity--had maintained that
man was endowed with sundry small facial muscles solely for the sake of
expressing his emotions. This view was so obviously opposed to the
belief in the descent of man from some lower form, 'that,' says Darwin,
'it was necessary for me to consider it;' and so he did, in a lengthy
work, where the whole subject is exhaustively treated, and Bell's idea
is completely pulverised by the apt allegation of analogous expressions
in the animal world. In his old age Darwin grew, in fact, only the more
ceaselessly and wonderfully industrious. In 1875, after three years of
comparative silence, came the 'Insectivorous Plants,' a work full of
minute observation on the habits and manners of the sundew, the
butterwort, the Venus's fly-catcher, and the various heterogeneous
bog-haunting species known by the common name of pitcher plants. The
bare mass and weight of the facts which Darwin had collected for the
'Origin of Species' might well-nigh have stifled the very existence of
that marvellous book: it was lucky that the premature publication of
Wallace's paper compelled him to hurry on his 'brief abstract,' for if
he had waited to select and arrange the whole series of observations
that he finally published in his various later justificatory volumes, we
might have looked in vain for the great systematic and organising work,
which would no doubt have been 'surcharged with its own weight, and
strangled with its waste fertility.' But the task that he himself best
loved was to watch in minute detail the principles whose secret he had
penetrated, and whose reserve he had broken, working themselves out
before his very eyes, naked and not ashamed--to catch Actæon-like the
undraped form of nature herself in the actual process of her inmost
being. He could patiently observe the red and slimy hair-glands of the
drosera closing slowly and remorselessly round the insect prey, and
sucking from their bodies with sensitive tentacles the protoplasmic
juices denied to its leaves by the poor and boggy soil, on which alone
its scanty rootlets can properly thrive. He could watch the butterwort
curving round the edges of its wan green foliage upon the captured limbs
of fly or aphis. He could note how the serried mass of finger-like
processes in the utricles of the bladderwort slowly absorb organic
matter from the larva of a gnat, or the minute water-insects entangled
within its living and almost animated lobster-pot. He could track the
long line of treacherous honey-glands by which the sarracenia entices
flies into the festering manure-wells of its sticky pitchers. The
minuteness and skill of all his observations on these lesser problems of
natural selection inevitably inspired faith among outsiders in the
cautious judgment of the observer and experimenter; and day by day
throughout his later years the evidence of the popular acceptance of his
doctrine, and of the dying away of the general ridicule with which it
was first received by the unlearned public, was very gratifying to the
great naturalist.
A year later, in 1876, came the 'Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation
in the Vegetable Kingdom.' So far as regarded the world of plants,
especially with respect to its higher divisions, this work was of
immense theoretical importance; and it also cast a wonderful side-light
upon the nature of that strange distinction of sex which occurs both in
the vegetable and animal kingdom, and in each is the concomitant--one
might almost say the necessary concomitant--of high development and
complex organisation. The great result attained by Darwin in his long
and toilsome series of experiments on this interesting subject was the
splendid proof of the law that cross-fertilisation produces finer and
healthier offspring, while continuous self-fertilisation tends in the
long run to degradation, degeneration, and final extinction.
Here as elsewhere, however, Darwin's principle does not spring
spontaneous, like Athene from the head of Zeus, a goddess full-formed,
uncaused, inexplicable: it arises gradually by a slow process of
development and modification from the previous investigations of earlier
biologists. At the close of the last century, in the terrible year of
upheaval 1793, a quiet German botanist, Christian Konrad Sprengel by
name, published at Berlin his long unheeded but intensely interesting
work on the 'Fertilisation of Flowers.' In the summer of 1789, while all
Europe was ablaze with the news that the Bastille had been stormed, and
a new era of humanity begun, the calm and peaceful Pomeranian observer
was noting in his own garden the curious fact that many flowers are
incapable of being fertilised without the assistance of flying insects,
which carry pollen from the stamens of one blossom to the sensitive
surface or ovary of the next. Hence he concluded that the secretion of
honey or nectar in flowers, the contrivances by which it is protected
from rain, the bright hues or lines of the corolla, and the sweet
perfume distilled by the blossoms, are all so many cunning devices of
nature to ensure fertilisation by the insect-visitors. Moreover,
Sprengel observed that many flowers are of one sex only, and that in
several others the sexes do not mature simultaneously; 'so that,' said
he, 'nature seems to intend that no flower shall be fertilised by means
of its own pollen.' Indeed, in some instances, as he showed by
experiments upon the yellow day lily, plants impregnated from their own
stamens cannot be made to set seed at all. 'So near,' says his able
successor, Hermann Müller, 'was Sprengel to the distinct recognition of
the fact that self-fertilisation leads to worse results than
cross-fertilisation, and that all the arrangements which favour
insect-visits are of value to the plant itself, simply because the
insect-visitors effect cross-fertilisation!' As in most other
anticipatory cases, however, it must be here remarked that Sprengel's
idea was wholly teleological: he conceived of nature as animated by a
direct informing principle, which deliberately aimed at a particular
result; whereas Darwin rather came to the conclusion that
cross-fertilisation as a matter of fact does actually produce beneficial
results, and that therefore those plants which varied most in the
direction of arrangements for favouring insect-visits were likely to be
exceptionally fortunate in the struggle for existence against
competitors otherwise arranged. It is just the usual Darwinian
substitution of an efficient for a final cause.
Even before Sprengel, Kölreuter had recognised, in 1761, that
self-fertilisation was avoided in nature; and his observations and
experiments on intercrossing and on hybridism were largely relied upon
by Darwin himself, to whom they suggested at an early period many
fruitful lines of original investigation. In 1799, again, Andrew Knight,
following up the same line of thought in England as Sprengel in Germany,
declared as the result of his close experiments upon the garden pea,
that no plant ever fertilises itself for a perpetuity of generations.
But Knight's law, not being brought into causal connection with any
great fundamental principle of nature, was almost entirely overlooked by
the scientific world until the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of
Species,' half a century later. The same neglect also overtook
Sprengel's immensely interesting and curious work on fertilisation of
flowers. The world, in fact, was not yet ready for the separate
treatment of functional problems connected with the interrelations of
organic beings; so Knight and Sprengel were laid aside unnoticed on the
dusty top bookshelves of public libraries, while the dry classificatory
and systematic biology of the moment had it ail its own way for the time
being on the centre reading-tables. So many separate and independent
strands of thought does it ultimately require to make up the grand final
generalisation which the outer world attributes in its totality to the
one supreme organising intelligence.
But in the 'Origin of Species' itself Darwin reiterated and emphasised
Knight's law as a general and all-pervading principle of nature, placing
it at the same time on broader and surer biological foundations by
affiliating it intimately upon his own great illuminating and unifying
doctrine of natural selection. He also soon after rescued from oblivion
Sprengel's curious and fairy-like book, showing in full detail in his
work on orchids the wonderful contrivances by which flowers seek to
attract and to secure the assistance of insects for the impregnation of
their embryo seeds. In the 'Variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication,' he further showed that breeding in-and-in diminishes the
strength and productiveness of the offspring; while crossing with
another stock produces, on the contrary, the best possible physical
results in both directions. And now at last, in the 'Effects of Cross
and Self fertilisation,' he proved by careful and frequently repeated
experiments that a constant infusion of fresh blood (so to speak) is
essential to the production of the healthiest offspring. In the words of
his own emphatic summing up, 'Nature abhors perpetual
self-fertilisation.'
The immediate result of these new statements and this fresh rationale of
Knight's law was to bring down Sprengel forthwith from the top shelf,
where he had languished ingloriously for seventy years, and to set a
whole school of ardent botanical observers working hard in the lines he
had laid down upon the mutual correlations of insects and flowers. A
vast literature sprang up at once upon this enchanting and
long-neglected subject, the most eminent workers in the rediscovered
field being Delpino in Italy, Hildebrand and Hermann Müller in Germany,
Axel in Sweden, Lubbock in England, and Fritz Müller in tropical South
America. Darwin found the question, in fact, almost taken out of his
hands before he had time himself to treat of it; for Hildebrand's chief
work was published as early as 1867, while Axel's appeared in 1869, both
of them several years earlier than Darwin's own final essay on the
subject in the 'Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation.' No statement,
perhaps, could more clearly mark the enormous impetus given to
researches in this direction than the fact that D'Arcy Thompson, in his
appendix to Müller's splendid work on the 'Fertilisation of Flowers,'
has collected a list of no less than eight hundred and fourteen separate
works or important papers bearing on that special department of botany,
almost all of them subsequent in date to the first publication of the
'Origin of Species.' So widely did the Darwinian wave extend, and so
profoundly did it affect every minute point of biological and
psychological investigation.
Each of these later works of Darwin's consists, as a rule, of an
expansion of some single chapter or paragraph in the 'Origin of
Species;' or, to speak more correctly, of an arrangement of the
materials collected and the experiments designed for that particular
portion of the great projected encyclopædia of evolutionism, of which
the 'Origin of Species' itself was but a brief anticipatory summary or
rough outline. Thus, the book on Orchids, published in 1862, is already
foreshadowed in a part of the chapter on the Difficulties of the Theory
of Natural Selection; the 'Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants'
(1865) is briefly summarised by anticipation in the long section on
Modes of Transition; the 'Variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication' (1868) consists of the vast array of _pièces
justificatives_ for the first chapter of the 'Origin of Species;' and
the germ of the 'Cross and Self Fertilisation' (1876) is to be seen in
the passage 'On the Intercrossing of Individuals' in Chapter IV. of the
same work. It was well indeed that Darwin began by publishing the
shorter and more manageable abstract; the half, as the wise Greek
proverb shrewdly remarks, is often more than the whole; and a world that
eagerly devoured the first great deliverance of the Darwinian principle,
might have stood aghast had it been asked to swallow it piecemeal in
such gigantic treatises as those with which its author afterwards sought
thrice to vanquish all his foes and thrice to slay the slain.
Yet, with each fresh manifestation of Darwin's inexhaustible resources,
on the other hand, the opposition to his principles grew feebler and
feebler, and the universality of their acceptance more and more
pronounced, till at last, among biologists at least, not to be a
Darwinian was equivalent to being hopelessly left behind by the general
onward movement of the time. In 1874 Tyndall delivered his famous
address at the Belfast meeting of the British Association; and in 1877,
from the same presidential chair at Plymouth, Allen Thomson, long
reputed a doubtful waverer, enforced his cordial adhesion to the
Darwinian principles by his inaugural discourse on 'The Development of
the Forms of Animal Life.' A new generation of active workers, trained
up from the first in the evolutionary school, like Romanes, Ray
Lankester, Thistleton Dyer, Balfour, Sully, and Moggridge, had now risen
gradually around the great master; and in every direction he could see
the seed he had himself planted being watered and nourished in fresh
soil by a hundred ardent and enthusiastic young disciples. Even in
France, ever irresponsive to the touch of new ideas of alien origin,
Colonel Moulinié's admirable and sympathetic translations were beginning
to win over to the evolutionary creed many rising workers; while in
Germany, Victor Carus's excellent versions had from the very first
brought in the enthusiastic Teutonic biologists with a congenial
'swarmery' to the camp of the Darwinians. Correspondents from every part
of the world kept pressing fresh facts and fresh applications upon the
founder of the faith; and Darwin saw his own work so fast being taken
out of his hands by specialist disciples that he abandoned entirely his
original intention of publishing in detail the basis of his first book,
and contented himself instead with tracing out minutely some minor
portions of his contemplated task as specimens of evolutionary method.
In 1877, in pursuance of this changed purpose, Darwin published his book
on 'Forms of Flowers,' in which he dealt closely with the old problem of
differently shaped blossoms on plants of the same species. It had long
been known, to take a single example, that primroses existed in two
forms, the pin-eyed and the thrum-eyed, of which the former has the
pin-like summit of the pistil at the top of the tube, and the stamens
concealed half way down its throat; while in the latter these relative
positions are exactly reversed, the stamens answering in place to the
pistil of the alternative form with geometrical accuracy. As early as
1862 Darwin had shown, in the 'Journal of the Linnean Society,' that
this curious arrangement owed its development to the greater security
which it afforded for cross-fertilisation, because in this way each
flower had to be impregnated with the pollen, from a totally distinct
blossom, growing on a different individual plant. In a series of
successive papers read before the same Society in the years between 1863
and 1868, he had extended a similar course of explanation to the
multiform flowers of the flaxes, the loosestrifes, the featherfoil, the
auricula, the buckbean, and several other well-known plants. At last, in
1877, he gathered together into one of the now familiar green-covered
volumes the whole of his observations on this strange peculiarity, and
proved by abundant illustration and experiment that the diversity of
form is always due through natural selection to the advantage gained by
perfect security of cross-fertilisation, resulting as it invariably does
in the production of the finest, strongest, and most successful
seedlings. Any variation, however peculiar, which helps to ensure this
constant infusion of fresh blood is certain to be favoured in the
struggle for life, owing to the superior vitality of the stock it
begets. But it is worthy of notice, as showing the extreme minuteness
and exhaustiveness of Darwin's method on the small scale, side by side
with his extraordinary and unusual power of rising to the very highest
and grandest generalisations, that the volume which he devoted to the
elucidation of this minor factor in the question of hereditary
advantages runs to nearly as many pages as the last edition of the
'Origin of Species' itself. So great was the wealth of observation and
experiment which he could lavish upon the solution of a single, small,
incidental problem.
Even fuller in minute original research was the work which Darwin
published in 1880, on 'The Power of Movement in Plants,' detailing the
result of innumerable observations on the seemingly irresponsible yet
almost purposive rotations of the growing rootlets and young stems of
peas and climbers. Anyone who wishes to see on what a wide foundation of
irrefragable fact the great biologist built up the stately fabric of his
vast theories cannot do better than turn for instruction to this
remarkable volume, which the old naturalist gave to the world some time
after passing the allotted span of threescore years and ten.
It was in the same year (1880) that Huxley delivered at the Royal
Institution his famous address on the Coming of Age of the 'Origin of
Species.' The time was a favourable one for reviewing the silent and
almost unobserved progress of a great revolution. Twenty-one years had
come and gone since the father of modern scientific evolutionism had
launched upon the world his tentative work. In those twenty-one years
the thought of humanity had been twisted around as upon some invisible
pivot, and a new heaven and a new earth had been presented to the eyes
of seers and thinkers. One-and-twenty years before, despite the
influence of Hutton and of Lyell, the dominant view of the earth's past
history revealed but one vast and lawless succession of hideous
catastrophes. Wholesale creations and wholesale extinctions, world-wide
cataclysms followed by fresh world-wide births of interwoven faunas and
floras--these, said Huxley, were the ordinary machinery of the
geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of the
mighty Cuvier. One-and-twenty years after, the opponents themselves had
given up the game in its fullest form as lost beyond the hope of
possible restitution. Some hesitating thinkers, it is true, while
accepting the evolutionary doctrine more or less in its earlier form,
like Mivart and Meehan, yet refused their assent on one ground or
another to the specific Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. Others,
like Wallace, made a special exception with regard to the development of
the human species, which they supposed to be due to other causes from
those implied in the remainder of the organic scale. Yet on the whole,
biological science had fairly carried the day in favour of evolution, in
one form or another, and not even the cavillers dared now to suggest
that whole systems of creation had been swept away _en bloc_, and remade
again in different forms for a succeeding epoch, in accordance with the
belief which was almost universal among geologists up to the exact
moment of the publication of Darwin's masterpiece.
During the twenty-one years, too, as Huxley likewise pointed out, an
immense number of new facts had come to strengthen the hands of the
evolutionists at the very point where they had before felt themselves
most openly vulnerable. Palæontology had supplied many of those missing
links in the organic chain whose absence from the interrupted and
imperfect geological record had been loudly alleged against the
Darwinian hypothesis in the earlier days of struggle and hesitation. Two
years after the publication of the 'Origin of Species,' the discovery of
a winged and feathered creature, happily preserved for us in the
Solenhofen slates, with lizard-like head and teeth and tail, and
bird-like pinions, feet, and breast, had bridged over in part the great
gap that yawns between the existing birds and reptiles. A few years
later, new fossil reptilian forms, erect on their hind legs like
kangaroos, and with very singular peculiarities of bony structure, had
helped still further to show the nature of the modifications by which
the scale-bearing quadruped type passed slowly into that of the
feather-bearing biped. In 1875, again, Professor Marsh's discovery of
the toothed birds in the American cretaceous strata completed the
illustrative series of transitional forms over what had once been the
most remarkable existing break in the continuity of organic development.
Similarly, Hofmeister's investigations in the vegetable world brought
close together the flowering and flowerless plants, by indicating that
the ferns and the horsetails were connected in curious unforeseen ways,
through the pill-worts and club-mosses, with the earliest and simplest
of forest trees, the firs and the puzzle-monkeys. In minor matters like
progress was continually reported on every side. Gaudry found among the
fossils of Attica the successive stages by which the ancient and
undeveloped civets passed into the more modern and specialised tribe of
the hyænas; Marsh traced out in Western America the ancestry of the
horse from a five-toed creature no bigger than a fox, through
intermediate four-toed and three-toed forms, to the existing single
solid-hoofed type with its digits reduced to the minimum of unity; and
Filhol unearthed among the phosphorites of Quercy the common progenitor
of the most distinct among the recent carnivores, the cats and the dogs,
the plantigrade bears and the digitigrade pumas. 'So far as the animal
world is concerned,' Professor Huxley said in conclusion, reviewing
these additions to the evidence upon that memorable occasion, 'evolution
is no longer a speculation but a statement of historical fact.' Of
Darwin himself he remarked truly, 'He has lived long enough to outlast
detraction and opposition, and to see the stone that the builders
rejected become the head-stone of the corner.'
It was in 1881 that Darwin published his last volume, 'The Formation of
Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.' In this singularly
fascinating and interesting monograph he took in hand one of the
lowliest and humblest of living forms, the common earthworm, and by an
exhaustive study of its habits and manners strove to show how the
entire existence of vegetable mould--the ordinary covering of fertile
soil upon the face of the earth--is due to the long but unobtrusive
action of these little-noticed and ever-active architects. By the acids
which they evolve, they appear to aid largely in the disintegration of
the stone beneath the surface; by their constant practice of eating
fallen leaves, which they drag down with them into their subterranean
burrows, they produce the fine castings of soft earth, so familiar to
everybody, and thus reinstate the coating of humus above the bare rock
as often as it is washed away again in the course of ordinary denudation
by the rain and the torrents. It is true that subsequent investigation
has shown the possibility of vegetable mould existing under certain
conditions without the intervention of worms to any marked extent; but,
as a whole, there can be little doubt that over most parts of the world
the presence of soil, and therefore of the vegetable growth rooted in
it, is entirely due to the unsuspected yet ceaseless activity of these
humble creatures.
The germ of the earthworm theory appears to me to have been first
suggested to Darwin's mind by a passage in a work where one would little
have suspected it--White's 'Natural History of Selborne.' 'Earthworms,'
says the idyllic Hampshire naturalist, 'though in appearance a small and
despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a
lamentable chasm. For to say nothing of half the birds, and some
quadrupeds, which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to
be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely
without them, by boring, perforating, and loosening the soil, and
rendering it pervious to rains and the fibres of plants, by drawing
straws and stalks of leaves into it; and, most of all, by throwing up
such infinite numbers of lumps of earth, called worm-casts, which, being
their excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass. Worms probably
provide new soils for hills and slopes where the rain washes the earth
away; and they affect slopes, probably, to avoid being flooded.
Gardeners and farmers express their detestation of worms; the former,
because they render their walks unsightly, and make them much work; and
the latter, because, as they think, worms eat their green corn. But
these men would find, that the earth without worms would soon become
cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and, consequently, sterile.'
If Darwin ever read this interesting passage, which he almost certainly
must at some time have done, it would appear that he had overlooked it
in later life; for he, who was habitually so candid and careful in the
acknowledgment of all his obligations, however great or however small,
does not make any mention of it at all in his 'Vegetable Mould,' though
he alludes incidentally to some other observations of Gilbert White's on
the minor habits and manners of earthworms. But whether Darwin was
originally indebted to White or not for the foundation of his theory on
the subject of mould, the important point to notice is really this, that
what with the observant parson of Selborne was but a casual glimpse, the
mere passing suggestion of a fruitful idea, became with Darwin, in his
wider fashion, a carefully elaborated and powerfully buttressed theory,
supported by long and patient investigation, ample experiment, and vast
collections of minute facts. The difference is strikingly characteristic
of the strong point of Darwin's genius. While he had all the breadth and
universality of the profoundest thinkers, he had also all the marvellous
and inexhaustible patience of the most precise and special microscopical
student.
For years, indeed, Darwin studied the ways and instincts of the common
earthworm with the same close and accurate observation which he gave to
every other abstruse subject that engaged in any way his acute
intellect. The lawyer's maxim, 'De minimis lex non curat,' he used to
say, never truly applies to science. As early as the year 1837 he read a
paper, before the Geological Society of London, 'On the Formation of
Mould,' in which he developed with some fulness the mother idea of his
complete theory on the earthworm question. He there showed that layers
of cinders, marl, or ashes, which had been strewn thickly over the
surface of meadows, were found a few years after at a depth of some
inches beneath the turf, yet still forming in spite of their burial a
regular and fairly horizontal stratum. This apparent sinking of the
stones, he believed, was due to the quantity of fine earth brought up to
the surface by worms in the form of castings. It was objected to his
theory at the time that the work supposed to be accomplished by the
worms was out of all reasonable proportion to the size and numbers of
the alleged actors. Here Darwin's foot was on his native heath; he felt
himself immediately on solid ground again. The cumulative importance of
separately infinitesimal elements is indeed the very keynote and special
peculiarity of the great biologist's method of thinking. He had found
out in very truth that many a little makes a mickle, that the infinitely
small, infinitely repeated, may become in process of infinite years
infinitely important. So he set himself to work, with characteristic
contempt of time, to weigh and measure worms and worm-castings.
He began by keeping tame earthworms in flower-pots in his own house,
counting the number of worms and burrows in certain measured spaces of
pasture or garden, and starting his long and slow experiment in his
field at Down already alluded to. He tried issues on their senses, on
their instincts, on their emotions, on their intelligence; he watched
them darting wildly like rabbits into their holes when alarmed from
without, overcoming engineering difficulties in dragging down
oddly-shaped or unfamiliar leaves, and protecting the open mouths of
their tunnels from intruders with a little defensive military glacis of
rounded pebbles. He found that more than 53,000 worms on an average
inhabit every acre of garden land, and that a single casting sometimes
weighs as much as three ounces avoirdupois. Ten tons of soil per acre
pass annually through their bodies, and mould is thrown up by them at an
average rate of 22 inches in a century. Careful observations on the
stones of Stonehenge; on the tiled floors of buried buildings; on Roman
ruins at Silchester and Wroxeter, and on his own meadows and pastures at
Down, finally enabled the cautious experimenter to prove conclusively
the truth of his thesis, and to present to the world the despised
earthworm in a new character, as the friend of man and of agriculture,
the producer and maintainer of the vegetable mould on our hills or
valleys, and the prime cause of the very existence of that cloak of
greensward that clothes our lawns, our fields, and our pleasure-grounds.
It was his last work. Persistent ill-health and equally persistent study
for seventy-three years had broken down a constitution never really
strong, and consumed from within by the ceaseless fires of its own
overpowering and undying energy. On Tuesday, April the 18th, 1882, he
was seized at midnight by violent pains, and at four o'clock on
Wednesday afternoon he died suddenly in his son's arms, after a very
short but painful illness. So retired was the family life at Down that
the news of the great biologist's death was not actually known in London
itself till two days after he had breathed his last.
The universal regret and grief expressed at the loss in all civilised
countries was the best measure of the immense change of front which had
slowly come over the whole educated community, in the twenty-three years
since the first publication of the 'Origin of Species.' No sooner was
Darwin's death announced than all lands and all classes vied with one
another in their eagerness to honour the name and memory of the great
biologist. Indeed, the spontaneous and immediate nature of the outburst
of regret and affectionate regard which followed hard upon the news of
Darwin's death, astonished even those who had watched closely the
extraordinary revolution the man himself had brought so well to its
final consummation. In England, it was felt instinctively on every side
that the great naturalist's proper place was in the aisles of
Westminster, hard by the tomb of Newton, his immortal predecessor. To
this universal and deep-seated feeling Darwin's family regretfully
sacrificed their own natural preference for a quiet interment in the
graveyard at Down. On the Wednesday morning next after his death,
Charles Darwin's remains were borne with unwonted marks, of respect and
ceremony, in the assembled presence of all that was noble and good in
Britain, to an honoured grave in the precincts of the great Abbey.
Wallace and Huxley, Lubbock and Hooker, his nearest peers in the domain
of pure science, stood among the bearers who held the pall. Lowell
represented the republics of America and of letters. Statesmen, and
poets, and philosophers, and theologians mingled with the throng of
scientific thinkers who crowded close around the venerated bier. No
incident of fitting pomp or dignity was wanting as the organ pealed out
in solemn strains the special anthem composed for the occasion, to the
appropriate words of the Hebrew poet, 'Happy is the man that findeth
wisdom.' Even the narrow Philistine intelligence itself, which still
knew Darwin only as the man who thought we were all descended from
monkeys, was impressed with the sole standard of greatness open to its
feeble and shallow comprehension by the mere solemnity and ceremony of
the occasion, and began to enquire with blind wonderment what this
thinker had done whom a whole people thus delighted to honour.
Of Darwin's pure and exalted moral nature no Englishman of the present
generation can trust himself to speak with becoming moderation. His love
of truth, his singleness of heart, his sincerity, his earnestness, his
modesty, his candour, his absolute sinking of self and
selfishness--these, indeed, are all conspicuous to every reader, on the
very face of every word he ever printed. Like his works themselves, they
must long outlive him. But his sympathetic kindliness, his ready
generosity, the staunchness of his friendship, the width and depth and
breadth of his affections, the manner in which 'he bore with those who
blamed him unjustly without blaming them in return,' these things can
never so well be known to any other generation of men as to the three
generations who walked the world with him. Many even of those who did
not know him loved him like a father; to many who never saw his face,
the hope of winning Charles Darwin's approbation and regard was the
highest incentive to thought and action. Towards younger men,
especially, his unremitting kindness was always most noteworthy: he
spoke and wrote to them, not like one of the masters in Israel, but like
a fellow-worker and seeker after truth, interested in their interests,
pleased at their successes, sympathetic with their failures, gentle to
their mistakes. Not that he ever spared rightful criticism; on the
contrary, the love of truth was with him so overpowering and enthralling
a motive that he pointed out what seemed to him errors or misconceptions
in the work of others with perfect frankness, fully expecting them to be
as pleased and delighted at a suggested amendment of their faulty
writing as he himself was in his own case. But his praise was as
generous as his criticism was frank; and, amid all the toil of his
laborious life in his study at Down, he could always find time to read
and comment at full length upon whatever fresh contributions to his own
subjects the merest tyro might venture to submit for his consideration.
He had the sympathetic receptivity of all truly great minds, and when
he died, thousands upon thousands who had never beheld his serene
features and his fatherly eyes felt they had lost indeed a personal
friend.
Greatness is not always joined with gentleness: in Charles Darwin's
case, by universal consent of all who knew him, 'an intellect which had
no superior' was wedded to 'a character even nobler than the
intellect.'