Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley Part 6

Bates stayed in the country till June, 1859, but Wallace left in 1852, and in the following year published an account of his journey under the t.i.tle of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. That book was written under the serious disadvantage of the destruction of the greater part of the notes and specimens by the burning of the ship in which Mr. Wallace took pa.s.sage on his homeward voyage. That it remains one of the select company of works of travel for which demand is continuous is evidenced in a reprint which appeared in 1891. If it affords few hints of the author's bent of mind toward the question of the origin of species, it shows what interest was being aroused within him over the allied subject of the geographical distribution of plants and animals which Mr. Wallace was to make so markedly his own.

In 1854 he sailed for the Malay Archipelago, where nearly eight years were spent in exploring the region from Sumatra to New Guinea. The large and varied outcome of that labour was embodied in numerous papers communicated to learned societies and scientific journals, and in a series of delightful books from The Malay Archipelago, first published in 1869, to Island Life, published in 1880. Among the minor results of his extensive travels--for all else that Wallace did pales before the great discovery which links his name with Darwin's--was the establishment of a line, known as "Wallace's," which divides the Malay Archipelago into two main groups, "Indo-Malaysia and Austro-Malaysia, marked by distinct species and groups of animals." That line runs through a deep channel separating the islands of Bali and Lombok; the plants and animals on which, although but fifteen miles of water separate them, differ from each other even more than do the islands of Great Britain and j.a.pan. "A similar line, but somewhat farther east, divides on the whole the Malay from the Papuan races of man."

Among the more fugitive contributions which mark Mr. Wallace's approach to a solution of the problem in quest of which he and Bates went to the Amazons is a paper On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species, published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 1855. In this he shows that some form of evolution of one species from another is needed to explain the geological and geographical facts of which examples are given.

In the interesting preface to the reprint of the famous paper On the Tendencies of Varieties to depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, Mr. Wallace recites the several researches which he made in quest of that "form" till, when lying ill with fever at Ternate, in February, 1858, something led him to think of the "positive checks" described by Malthus in his Essay on Population, a book which he had read some years before. Oddly enough, therefore, the honours lie with the maligned Haileybury Reverend Professor of Political Economy in furnishing both Darwin and Wallace with the clue. The "positive checks"--war, disease, famine--Wallace felt must act even more effectively on the lower animals than on man, because of their more rapid rate of multiplication. And he tells us, in the prefatory note to a reprint of his paper, "there suddenly flashed on me the _idea_ of the survival of the fittest, and in the two hours that elapsed before my ague fit was over I had thought out the whole of the theory, and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it out in full and sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin," asking him, if he thought well of the essay, to send it to Lyell. This Darwin did with the following remarks: "Your words have come true with a vengeance--that I should be forestalled.... I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.

Please return me the MS., which he does not say he wishes me to publish; but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send to any journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed, though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated, as all the labour consists in the application of the theory." Darwin came out well in this business. For to have hit upon a theory which interprets so large a question as the origin and causes of modification of life-forms; to keep on turning it over and over again in the mind for twenty long years; to spend the working hours of every day in collection and verification of facts for and against it; and then to have another man launching a "bolt from the blue" in the shape of a paper with exactly the same theory, might well disturb even a philosopher of Darwin's serenity.

However, both Hooker and Lyell had read his sketch a dozen years before, and it was arranged by them, not as considering claims of priority, which have too often been occasion of unworthy wrangling, but in the "interests of science generally," that an abstract of Darwin's ma.n.u.script should be read with Wallace's paper at a meeting of the Linnaean Society on the 1st of July, 1858. The full t.i.tle of the joint communication was On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties, and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Selection. Sir Joseph Hooker, describing the gathering, says that "the interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists before armouring. After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath. Lyell's approval, and perhaps, in a small way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows, who would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. We had, too, the vantage ground of being familiar with the authors and their theme."

Nothing can deprive Mr. Wallace of the honour due to him as the co-originator of the theory, which, regarded in its application to the origin, history, and destiny of man, involves the most momentous changes in belief, and there may be fitly quoted here his own modest and, doubtless, correct, a.s.sessment of limitations which in no wise invalidate his high claims. In the Preface to his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870), Mr. Wallace says the book will prove that he both saw at the time the value and scope of the law which he had discovered, and has since been able to apply to some purpose in a few original lines of investigation. "But," he adds, "here my claims cease.

I have felt all my life, and I still feel, the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me, and that it was not left for me to attempt to write the Origin of Species. I have long since measured my own strength, and know full well that it would be quite unequal to that task. Far abler men than myself may confess that they have not that untiring patience in acc.u.mulating, and that wonderful skill in using, large ma.s.ses of facts of the most varied kind--that wide and accurate physiological knowledge--that acuteness in devising and skill in carrying out experiments, and that admirable style of composition at once clear, persuasive, and judicial--qualities which, in their harmonious combination, mark out Mr. Darwin as the man, perhaps of all men now living, best fitted for the great work he has undertaken and accomplished."

In a letter to Wallace dated 20th April, 1870, Darwin says, "There has never been pa.s.sed on me, or, indeed, on any one, a higher eulogium than yours. I wish that I fully deserved it. Your modesty and candour are very far from new to me. I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect--and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me--that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in one sense rivals. I believe I can say this of myself with truth, and I am absolutely sure it is true of you."

But on one question, and that round which discussion still rages, the friends were poles asunder. There had been correspondence between them as to the bearing of the theory of natural selection on man, and in April, 1869, Darwin wrote, "As you expected, I differ grievously from you, and I am very sorry for it. I can see no necessity for calling in an additional and proximate cause in regard to man." In the fifteenth chapter of his comprehensive book on Darwinism, Wallace admits the action of natural selection in man's physical structure. This structure cla.s.ses him among the vertebrates; the mode of human suckling cla.s.ses him among the mammals; his blood, his muscles, and his nerves, the structure of his heart with its veins and arteries, his lungs and his whole respiratory and circulatory systems, all closely correspond to those of other mammals, and are often almost identical with them. He possesses the same number of limbs, terminating in the same number of digits, as belong fundamentally to the mammals. His senses are identical with theirs, and his organs of sense are the same in number and occupy the same relative position. Every detail of structure which is common to the mammalia as a cla.s.s is found also in man, while he differs from them only in such ways and degrees as the various species or groups of mammals differ from each other. He is, like them, begotten by s.e.xual conjugation; like them, developed from a fertilized egg, and in his embryonic condition pa.s.ses through stages recapitulating the variety of enormously remote ancestors of whom he is the perfected descendant.

Full-grown, he appears as most nearly allied to the anthropoid or man-like apes; so much does his skeleton resemble theirs that, comparing him with the chimpanzee, we find, with very few exceptions, bone for bone, differing only in size, arrangement, and proportion.

Mr. Wallace, therefore, rejected the idea of man's special creation "as being entirely unsupported by facts, as well as in the highest degree improbable." _But he would not allow that natural selection explains the origin of man's spiritual and intellectual nature._ These, he argues, "must have had another origin, and for this origin we can only find an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit." More detailed treatment of this argument will be given further on; here reference is made to it as furnishing the explanation why Mr. Wallace kept not his "first estate," and dropped out of the ranks of Pioneers of Evolution.

Many subjects, as hinted above, have occupied his facile pen--land nationalization, causes of depression in trade, labourers' allotments, vaccination, _et hoc genus omne_; showing, at least, the prominence which all social matters occupy in the minds of the leading exponents of the theory of Evolution. For of this, as will be seen, both Herbert Spencer and Huxley supply cogent examples in their application of that theory to human interests. But it is as a defender, although on lines of his own not wholly orthodox, of supernaturalism, with attendant beliefs in miracles and the grosser forms of spiritualism, that Mr. Wallace appears in the character of opponent to the inclusion of man's psychical nature as a product of Evolution.

The arresting influence of these views when backed by honest, sincere, and eminent men of the type of Mr. Wallace, and when also supported by several prominent men of science, renders it desirable to show that modern psychism is but savage animism "writ large," and wholly explicable on the theory of continuity. In his book on Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, of which a revised edition, with chapters on Apparitions and Phantasms, was issued in 1895, Mr. Wallace contends that "Spiritualism, if true, furnishes such proofs of the existence of ethereal beings and of their power to act upon matter, as must revolutionise philosophy. It demonstrates the actuality of forms of matter and modes of being before inconceivable; it demonstrates mind without brain, and intelligence disconnected from what we know as the material body; and it thus cuts away all presumption against our continued existence after the physical body is disorganised and dissolved. Yet more, it demonstrates, as completely as the fact can be demonstrated, that the so-called dead are still alive; that our friends are still with us, though unseen, and guide and strengthen us when, owing to absence of proper conditions, they cannot make their presence known. It thus furnishes a _proof_ of a future life which so many crave, and for want of which so many live and die in anxious doubt, so many in positive disbelief. It subst.i.tutes a definite, real, and practical conviction for a vague, theoretical, and unsatisfying faith. It furnishes actual knowledge on a matter of vital importance to all men, and as to which the wisest men and most advanced thinkers have held, and still hold, that no knowledge was attainable."

This claim, this tremendous claim, on behalf of the phenomena of spiritualism to supply an answer to "the question of questions; the ascertainment of man's relation to the universe of things; whence our race has come; to what goal we are tending," rests on the a.s.sumption with which Mr. Wallace starts, "Spiritualism, _if true_."

The essay from which the above pa.s.sages are quoted is preceded by references in detail to a considerable number of cases of "the appearance of preterhuman or spiritual beings," the evidence of which "is as good and definite as it is possible for any evidence of any fact to be." These ghost-stories, contrasted with the full-flavoured eerie tales of old, are feebly monotonous. The apparatus of the medium is limited: the phenomena are largely of the "horse-play" order. Through the whole series we vainly seek for some enn.o.bling and exalting conception of a life beyond, some glimpses "behind the veil," only to find that the shades are but diluted or vulgarized parodies of ourselves; or that "the filthy are filthy still," like the departed bargee whose "communicating intelligence" (we quote from a recent book on spiritualism ent.i.tled The Great Secret) was as coa.r.s.e-mouthed as when in the flesh. In considering, if it be deemed worth while, the evidence of genuineness of the occurrences, we are thrown, not on the honesty, but on the competency of the witnesses. The most eminent among these show themselves persons of undisciplined emotions. The distinguished physicist, Professor Oliver Lodge, who has been described to the writer by an intimate friend of the Professor as "longing to believe something," argues that in dealing with psychical phenomena, a hazy, muzzy state of mind is better than a mind "keenly awake" and "on the spot" (see Address to the Society for Psychical Research, Proceedings, part xxvi, pp. 14, 15). With this may be compared a Mohammedan receipt for summoning spirits given in Klunzinger's Upper Egypt (p. 386): "Fast seven days in a lonely place, and take incense with you. Read a chapter 1001 times from the Koran. That is the secret, and you will see indescribable wonders; drums will be beaten beside you, and flags hoisted over your head, and you will see spirits." Thus have the dreamy Oriental Moslem and the self-hypnotized Western professor met together to elicit truth from trance.

Concerning the competence of Mr. Wallace himself to weigh, unbia.s.sed, the evidence which comes before him, it suffices to cite the case of Eusapia Paladino, a Neapolitan "medium," who, in the words of one of her most ardent dupes, became "the unexpected instrument of driving conviction as to the reality of psychical manifestations by the invisible into the minds of many scientists." A number of distinguished savants testified to the genuineness of the woman's performances in Professor Richet's cottage on the Ile Roubant in the autumn of 1893. It was the serious and complete conviction of all of them (Lodge, Richet, Ochorowicz, and others) that "on no single occasion during the occurrence of an event recorded by them was a hand of Eusapia's free to execute any trick whatever." Mr. Maskelyne, such testimony notwithstanding, declared that the whole business was "the sorriest of trickeries," and, to the credit of the Society for Psychical Research, it undertook the expense of bringing Eusapia to England for the purpose of testing the genuineness of her doings. She was taken to a house in Cambridge, and detected as a vulgar impostor. Yet Mr. Wallace, in the new edition of his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, describes all the phenomena occurring at Professor Richet's house as "not explicable as the result of any known physical causes," and, in a subsequent explanatory letter to the Daily Chronicle of 24th of January, 1896, expresses the opinion that "the Cambridge experiments, so far as they are recorded, only prove that Eusapia _might_ have deceived, not that she actually and _consciously_ did so." The integrity of Mr. Wallace is not to be doubted, but what becomes of his competence to judge when prejudice blinds itself to facts? Spiritualism, _if true_, demonstrates this and that about the unseen; but spiritualism, _proved to be untrue_, lacks half the dexterity of an astute conjurer, and the whole of his honesty. Every scientific man recognises the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy as a fundamental canon. But with those who regard the phenomena of Spiritualism as "not explicable" except by supernatural causes, it would seem that that doctrine, as also the not unimportant conditions of Time and s.p.a.ce, count for nothing. When we read their reports of the behaviour of mediums who project (of course, in the dark) "abnormal temporary prolongations" like pseudopodia, we should feel alike depressed and confounded were there not abundant proofs what wholly untrustworthy observers scientific specialists can be outside their own domain. As the writer has remarked elsewhere, minds of this type must be built in water-tight compartments. They show how, even in the higher culture, the force of a dominant idea may suspend or narcotize the reason and judgment, and contribute to the rise and spread of another of the epidemic delusions of which history supplies warning examples.

They also show that man's senses have been his arch-deceivers, and his preconceptions their abettors, throughout human history; that advance has been possible only as he has escaped through the discipline of the intellect from the illusive impressions about phenomena which the senses convey. Upon this matter the words of the late Dr. Carpenter may be quoted, words the more weighty because they are the utterance of a man whose philosophy was influenced by deep religious convictions: "With every disposition to accept facts when I could once clearly satisfy myself that they were facts, I have had to come to the conclusion that whenever I have been permitted to employ such tests as I should employ in any scientific investigation, there was either intentional deception on the part of interested persons, or else self-deception on the part of persons who were very sober-minded and rational upon all ordinary affairs of life." He adds further: "It has been my business lately to inquire into the mental condition of some of the individuals who have reported the most remarkable occurrences. I cannot--it would not be fair--say all I could with regard to that mental condition; but I can only say this, that it all fits in perfectly well with the result of my previous studies upon the subject, viz., that there is nothing too strange to be believed by those who have once surrendered their judgment to the extent of accepting as credible things which common sense tells us are entirely incredible."

The fact abides that the great ma.s.s of supernatural beliefs which have persisted from the lower culture till now, and which are still held by an overwhelming majority of civilized mankind, are referable to causes concomitant with man's mental development: causes operative throughout his history. The low intellectual environment of his barbaric past was constant for thousands of years, and his adaptation thereto was complete. The intrusion of the scientific method in its application to man disturbed that equilibrium. But this, as yet, only superficially.

Like the foraminifera that persist in the ocean depths, the great majority of mankind have remained, but slightly, if at all, modified; thus ill.u.s.trating the truth of the doctrine of evolution in their psychical history. (For that doctrine does not imply all-round continuous advance. "Let us never forget," Mr. Spencer says in Social Statics, "that the law is--adaptation to circ.u.mstances, be they what they may.") Therefore the superst.i.tions that still dominate the life of man, even in so-called civilized centres, are no stumbling-blocks to us. They are supports along the path of inquiry, because we account for their persistence. Thought and feeling have a common base, because man is a unit, not a duality. But the exercise of the one has been active from the beginnings of his history--indeed we know not at what point backward we can cla.s.sify it as human or quasi-human--while the other, speaking comparatively, has but recently been called into play. So far as its influence on the modern World goes, may we not say that it began at least in the domain of scientific naturalism with the Ionian philosophers? Emotionally, we are hundreds of thousands of years old; rationally, we are embryos.

In other words, man wondered countless ages before he reasoned; because feeling travels along the line of least resistance, while thought, or the challenge by inquiry--therefore the a.s.sumption that there may be two sides to a question--must pursue a path obstructed by the dominance of custom, the force of imitation, and the strength of prejudice and fear.

It is here that anthropology, notably that psychical branch of it comprehended under folk-lore, takes up the cue from the momentous doctrine of heredity; explains the persistence of the primitive; and the causes of man's tardy escape from the illusions of the senses, and the general conservatism of human nature. "Born into life! in vain, Opinions, those or these, unalter'd to retain the obstinate mind decrees," as in the striking ill.u.s.tration cited in Heine's Travel-Pictures. "A few years ago Bullock dug up an ancient stone idol in Mexico, and the next day he found that it had been crowned during the night with flowers. And yet the Spaniard had exterminated the old Mexican religion with fire and sword, and for three centuries had been engaged in ploughing and harrowing their minds and implanting the seed of Christianity." The causes of error and delusion, and of the spiritual nightmares of olden time, being made clear, there is begotten a generous sympathy with that which empirical notions of human nature attributed to wilfulness or to man's fall from a high estate. Superst.i.tions which are the outcome of ignorance can only awaken pity. Where the corrective of knowledge is absent, we see that it could not be otherwise. Where that corrective is present, but either perverted or not exercised, pity is supplanted by blame. In either case, we learn that the art of life largely consists in that control of the emotions and that diversion of them into wholesome channels, which the intellect, braced with the latest knowledge, can alone effect.

Therefore, discarding theories of revelation, spiritual illumination, and other a.s.sumed supra-mundane sources of knowledge, sufficing causes of abnormal mental phenomena are found in abnormal working of the mental apparatus. The investigation of hallucinations (Lat. _alucinor_, to wander in mind) leaves no doubt that they are the effect of a morbid condition of that intricate, delicately poised structure, the nervous system, under which objects are seen and sensations felt when no corresponding impression has been made through the medium of the senses.

When the nervous system is out of gear, voices, whether divine or of the dead, may be heard; and actual figures may be seen. A mental image becomes a visual image; an imagined pain a real pain, as the great physiologist, John Hunter, testified when he said, "I am confident that I can fix my attention to any part until I have a sensation in that part." Shakespere portrays the like condition when Macbeth attempts to clutch the dagger wherewith to stab Duncan:

There's no such thing; It is the b.l.o.o.d.y business which informs Thus to mine eyes.

This abnormal state, which sees things having no existence outside the "mind's eye," is no respecter of persons; the savage and the civilized are alike its victims. It may be organic or functional. Organic, when disease is present; functional, through excessive fatigue, lack of food or sleep, or derangement of the digestive system, causing the patient, as Hood says, "to think he's pious when he's only bilious." Under such conditions, hallucinations of all sorts possess the mind; hallucinations from which the true peptic, who, as Carlyle says, "has no system," is delivered. Only the mentally anaemic, the emotionally overwrought, the unbalanced, and the epileptic, are the victims, whether of the lofty illusions of august visions such as carried Saint Paul, Saint Theresa, and Joan of Arc, into the presence of the holiest; or hallucination of drowned cat, thin and "dripping with water," born of the disordered nerves of Mrs. Gordon Jones. To quote from Dr. Gower's Bowman Lecture (Nature, 4th July, 1895) on Subjective Visual Sensations, such as accompany fits, when, e. g., sensations of sight occur without the retina being stimulated:

The spectra perceived before epileptic fits vary widely. They may be stars or sparks, spherical luminous bodies, or mere flashes of light, white or coloured, still or in movement. Often they are more elaborate, distinct visions of faces, persons, objects, places. They may be combined with sensations from the other special senses, as with hearing and smell. In one case a warning, constant for years, began with thumping in the chest ascending to the head, where it became a beating sound. Then two lights appeared, advancing nearer with a pulsating motion. Suddenly these disappeared and were replaced by the figure of an old woman in a red cloak, always the same, who offered the patient something that had the smell of Tonquin beans, and then he lost consciousness. Such warnings may be called psychovisual sensations. The psychical element may be very strong, as in one woman whose fits were preceded by a sudden distinct vision of London in ruins, the river Thames emptied to receive the rubbish, and she the only survivor of the inhabitants.

Had a man of lesser renown and mental calibre than Mr. Wallace thrown the weight of his testimony into the scales in favour of spiritualism, there would have been neither necessity nor excuse for this digression.

But both these pleas prevail when we find the co-formulator of the Darwinian theory among mediums and their dupes. The respectful attention which his words command: the tremendous claims which he makes on behalf of the phenomena at _seances_ as proving the existence of soul apart from body after death, and as revealing the conditions under which it lives, have made inc.u.mbent the foregoing attempt to indicate what other explanation is given of those phenomena, showing how these fall in with all we know of man's tendencies to imperfect observation and self-deception, and with all that history tells of the persistence of animistic ideas.

A salutary lesson on the use and misuse of the imagination is thus taught. That which, under wholesome restraint, is the initiative and incentive of inquiry, of enterprise, and of n.o.ble ideas; unrestricted, leads the dreamer and the enthusiast into ingulfing quicksands of illusions and delusions. Hence the necessity of curbing a faculty so that in unison with reason, it works toward definite ends within the domain, marking man's limits of service. As Dr. Maudsley reminds us in his sane and sober book on Natural Causes and Supernatural Seeming, "not by standing out of Nature in the ecstasy of a rapt and over-strained idealism of any sort, but by large and close and faithful converse with Nature and human nature in all their moods, aspects, and relations, is the solid basis of fruitful ideas and the soundest mental development laid. The endeavour to stimulate and strain any mental function to an activity beyond the reach and need of a physical correlate in external nature, and to give it an independent value, is certainly an endeavour to go directly contrary to the sober and salutary method by which solid human development has taken place in the past, and is taking place in the present."

The story of Darwin's work must now be resumed. Shortly after the Linnaean meeting, he prepared a series of chapters which, always regarded by him as an "Abstract," ultimately took book form, and was published, under the t.i.tle of the Origin of Species, on the 24th of November, 1859.

The story of the reception of the work is admirably told by Huxley in the chapter which he contributed to Darwin's Life and Letters, and it may be commended as useful reading to a generation which, drinking-in Darwinism from its birth, will not readily understand how such storm and outcry as rent the air, both in scientific as well as clerical quarters, could have been raised. "In fact," says Huxley, "the contrast between the present condition of public opinion upon the Darwinian question; between the estimation in which Darwin's views are now held in the scientific world; between the acquiescence, or, at least, quiescence, of the theologian of the self-respecting order at the present day, and the outburst of antagonism on all sides in 1858-59, when the new theory respecting the origin of species first became known to the older generation to which I belong, is so startling that, except for doc.u.mentary evidence, I should be sometimes inclined to think my memories dreams." The like reflection arises when we consider the indifference with which books of the most daring and revolutionary character, both in theology and morals, are treated nowadays, in contrast to the uproar which greeted such a _brutum fulmen_ as Essays and Reviews. As for Colenso's Pentateuch, and books of its type, orthodoxy has long taken them to its bosom.

So far as the larger number of naturalists, and of the intelligent public who followed their lead, were concerned, there was an absolutely open mind on the question of the mutation of species. There had been, as the foregoing sections of this book have shown, a long time of preparation and speculation. We certainly find the keynote of Evolution in Herac.l.i.tus, and more than two thousand years after his time Herbert Spencer, above all men, had removed it from the empirical stage, and placed it on a base broad as the facts which supported it. But it needed the leaven of the human and personal to stir it into life, and touch man in his various interests; and not all that Mr. Spencer had done in application of the theory of development to social questions and inst.i.tutions could avail much till Darwin's theory gave it practical shape. Dissertations on the pa.s.sage of the "h.o.m.ogeneous to the heterogeneous"; explanations of the theory of the evolution of complex sidereal systems out of diffused vapours of seemingly simple texture, interested people only in a vague and wondering fashion. But when Darwin ill.u.s.trated the theory of the modification of life-forms by familiar examples gathered from his own experiments and observations, and from intercourse with breeders of pigeons, horses, and dogs, this went to men's "business and bosoms," and if the vulgar interpreted Darwinism, as some, who should know better, interpret it even now, as explaining man's descent from a monkey, or how a bear became a whale by taking to swimming, the thoughtful accepted it as a master-key unlocking not the mystery of origins or of causes of variations, but the mystery of the ceaselessly-acting agent which, operating on favourable variations, has brought about myriads of species from simple forms.

As Huxley reminds us in the pa.s.sage quoted above, the att.i.tude of the clergy toward the theory of Evolution has undergone an astounding change. Dr. Whewell remarked that every great discovery in science has had to pa.s.s through three stages. First, people said, "It is absurd"; then they said, "It is contrary to the Bible"; finally, they said, "We always knew that it was so." Thus it has been with Evolution. It is calmly discussed; even claimed as a "defender of the faith," at Church Congresses nowadays. It was not so in the sixties. Here and there a single voice was raised in qualified sympathy--Charles Kingsley showed more than this--but both in the Old and the New World the "drum ecclesiastic" was beaten. Cardinal Manning declared Darwinism to be a "brutal philosophy, to wit, there is no G.o.d and the ape is our Adam."

Protestant and Catholic agreed in condemning it as "an attempt to dethrone G.o.d"; as "a huge imposture," as "tending to produce disbelief of the Bible," and "to do away with all idea of G.o.d," as "turning the Creator out of doors." Such are fair samples to be culled from the anthology of invective which was the staple content of nearly every "criticism." Occasionally some parody of reasoning appears when the "argument" is advanced that there is "a simpler explanation of the presence of these strange forms among the works of G.o.d in the fall of Adam," but even this pseudo-concession to logic is rare; and one divine had no hesitation in predicting the fate of Darwin and his followers in the world to come. "If," said a Dr. Duffield in the Princeton Review, "the development theory of the origin of man shall, in a little while, take the place--as doubtless it will--with other exploded scientific speculations, then they who accept it with its proper logical consequences will, in the life to come, have their portion with those who in this life 'know not G.o.d and obey not the Gospel of His Son.'" But the most notable attack came from Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford, in the Quarterly Review of July, 1860. "It is," said Huxley, in his review of Haeckel's Evolution of Man, "a production which should be bound in good stout calf, or better, a.s.ses' skin, by the curious book-collector, together with Brougham's attack on the undulatory theory of light when it was first propounded by Young." The bishop declared "the principle of natural selection to be absolutely incompatible with the word of G.o.d" and as "contradicting the revealed relations of creation to its Creator." If by "revealed relations" and the "word of G.o.d" the Bible is intended, the evolutionist is in agreement with the bishop. But, at this time of day, it seems scarcely worth while to shake the dust off articles which have gone the way of all purely controversial matter, and justification for reference to them lies only in the fact that the contest between the biologists and the bishops is not yet ended.

In contrast to all this, and in evidence of the compromise by which theology is vainly striving to justify itself, are these vague sentences from Archdeacon Wilson's address at the Church Congress at Shrewsbury in the autumn of 1896: "It is scarcely too much to say that the Theistic Evolutionist cannot be otherwise than a practical Trinitarian, and cannot find a difficulty in the Incarnation or in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit." "Christian doctrine, apart from the statement of historical facts, is the attempt to create out of Christ's teaching, a philosophy of life which shall satisfy these needs (i. e., the needs of humanity), and it will therefore remain the same in substance. But the form in which that doctrine will be presented must change with man's intellectual environment. The bearing of Evolution on Christian doctrine is, therefore, in a word, to modify, not the doctrine, but the form in which it is expressed."

Postponing the story of the famous debate between Wilberforce and Huxley, the reception accorded to the Origin of Species by Darwin's scientific contemporaries may be noted. Herbert Spencer's position, as will be shown later on, was already distinctive: he was a Darwinian before Darwin. Hooker, Huxley,--who said that he was prepared to go to the stake, if needs be, in support of some parts of the book,--Bates, and Lubbock were immediate converts; so were Asa Gray and Lyell, but with reservations, for Lyell, whose creed was Unitarian, never wholly accepted the inclusion of man, "body, soul, and spirit," as the outcome of natural selection. Henslow and Pictet went one mile, but refused to go twain; Aga.s.siz, Murray, and Harvey would have none of the new heresy; neither would Adam Sedgwick, who wrote a long protest to Darwin, couched in loving terms, and ending with the hope that "we shall meet in heaven." The att.i.tude of Owen, if apparently neutral or tentative in open conversation, was, as an anonymous critic, deadly hostile. Although it is not included in the list of his writings given in the Life by his grandson, he is known to have been the author of the critique on the Origin of Species in the Edinburgh Review of April, 1860.

At the outset of the article he speaks of Darwin's "seduction" of "several, perhaps the majority of our younger naturalists" by the h.o.m.oeopathic form of the trans.m.u.tation of species presented to them under the phrase of natural selection.... "Owen has long stated his belief that some pre-ordained law or secondary cause is operative in bringing about the change ... we therefore regard the painstaking and minute comparison by Cuvier of the osteological and every other character that could be tested in the mummified ibis, cat, or crocodile with those of species living in his time; and the equally philosophical investigation of the polyps operating at an interval of thirty thousand years in the building-up of coral reefs by the profound palaeontologist of Neuchatel (Aga.s.siz is here referred to), as of far truer value in reference to the inductive determination of the question of the origin of species than the speculations of Demailler, Buffon, Lamarck, 'Vestiges,' Baden Powell, or Darwin" (p. 532).

Entangled in the meshes of this theory of a "pre-ordained law," which seems to bear some relation to Aristotle's "perfecting principle," and is in close alliance with the teaching of the great Cuvier, at whose feet Owen had sat, he remained to the end of his life a type of arrested development. While the Church cited him as an authority against the Darwinian theory, especially in its application to man's descent, there remained in the memory of his brother savants his lack of candour in never withdrawing the statement made by him, and demonstrated by Huxley as untrue, that the "hippocampus minor" in the human brain is absent from the brain of the ape.

As for the reception of the book abroad, the French savants were somewhat coy, but the Germans, with Haeckel at their head, were enthusiastic. Darwin had, like all prophets, more honour in other countries than in his own, Evolution being rechristened _Darwinismus_.

Translation after translation of the Origin followed apace, and the personal interest that gathered round the central idea led to the perusal of the book by people who had never before opened a scientific treatise. Punch seized on it as subject of caricature; and writers of light verse found welcome material for "chaff" which the winds of oblivion have blown away, a stanza here and there surviving, as in Mr.

Courthope's Aristophanic lines:

Eggs were laid as before, but each time more and more varieties struggled and bred, Till one end of the scale dropped its ancestor's tail, and the other got rid of his head.

From the bill, in brief words, were developed the Birds, unless our tame pigeons and ducks lie; From the tail and hind legs, in the second-laid eggs, the apes.--and Professor Huxley!

Heeding neither squib, satire, nor sermon, Darwin, in the quiet of his Kentish home, went on rearranging old materials, collecting new materials, and verifying both, the outcome of this being his works on the Fertilization of Orchids and the Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, published in 1862 and 1867 respectively. Between these dates Huxley's Man's Place in Nature--logical supplement to the Origin of Species--appeared. But of this more anon.

Meanwhile, as already named, Mr. Patrick Matthew had in the Gardener's Chronicle of 7th April, 1860, drawn attention to an appendix to his book on Naval Timber and Arboriculture published in 1831, in which he antic.i.p.ated Darwin and Wallace's theory as follows:

"The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of Nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and pre-occupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better-suited-to-circ.u.mstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other kind; the weaker and less circ.u.mstance-suited being prematurely destroyed. This principle is in constant action; it regulates the colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals in each species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies, or defence from inclemencies or vicissitudes of climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies to self-advantage according to circ.u.mstances--in such immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come to maturity from the strict ordeal by which Nature tests their adaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction" (pp. 384, 385).

While speaking of difficulty in understanding some pa.s.sages in Mr.

Matthew's appendix, Darwin says that "the full force of the principle of natural selection" is there, and, in referring to it in a letter to Lyell, he adds that "one may be excused in not having discovered the fact in a work on Naval Timber!"

Five years after this, another pre-Darwinian was unearthed, and, like Patrick Matthew, in unsuspected company. Dr. W. C. Wells read a paper before the Royal Society in 1813 on a White Female Part of whose Skin resembles that of a Negro, but this was not published till 1818, when it formed part of a volume including the author's famous Two Essays upon Dew and Single Vision. In his Historical Sketch Darwin says that Wells "distinctly recognises the principle of natural selection, and this is the first recognition which has been indicated; but he applies it only to the races of man, and to certain characters alone.... Of the accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the first few and scattered inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa, some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the country. This race would consequently multiply, while the others would decrease; not only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease, but from their incapacity of contending with their more vigorous neighbours."

When the simplicity of the long-hidden solution is brought home, we can understand Huxley's reflection on mastering the central idea of the Origin: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" Twelve years elapsed before Darwin followed up his world-shaking book with the Descent of Man. But the ground had been prepared for its reception in the decade between 1860 and 1870. Quoting Grant Allen's able summary of the advance of the theory of Evolution in his Charles Darwin: "One by one the few scientific men who still held out were overborne by the weight of evidence. Geology kept supplying fresh instances of transitional forms; the progress of research in unexplored countries kept adding to our knowledge of existing intermediate species and varieties. During those ten years, Herbert Spencer published his First Principles, his Biology, and the remodelled form of his Psychology; Huxley brought out Man's Place in Nature, the Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, and the Introduction to the Cla.s.sification of Animals; Wallace produced his Malay Archipelago and his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (Bates, we may here add to Mr. Allen's list, published his paper on Mimicry in 1861, and his Naturalist on the Amazons in 1863); and Galton wrote his admirable work on Hereditary Genius, of which his own family is so remarkable an instance. Tyndall and Lewes had long since signified their warm adhesion. At Oxford, Rolleston was bringing up a fresh generation of young biologists in the new faith; at Cambridge, Darwin's old university, a whole school of brilliant and accurate physiologists was beginning to make itself both felt and heard.

In the domain of anthropology, Tylor was welcoming the a.s.sistance of the new ideas, while Lubbock was engaged on his kindred investigations into the Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. All these diverse lines of thought both showed the widespread influence of Darwin's first great work, and led up to the preparation of his second, in which he dealt with the history and development of the human race.

And what was thus true of England was equally true of the civilized world, regarded as a whole: everywhere the great evolutionary movement was well in progress, everywhere the impulse sent forth from the quiet Kentish home was permeating and quickening the entire pulse of intelligent humanity."

The Origin of Species, as we have seen, was intended as a rough draft or preliminary outline of the theory of natural selection. The materials which Darwin had collected in support of that theory being enormous, the several books which followed between 1859 and 1881, the year before his death, were expansions of hints and parts of the pioneer book. The last to appear was that treating of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. It embodied the results of experiments which had been carried on for more than forty years, since, as far back as 1837, Darwin read a paper on the subject before the Geological Society.

Reference to it recalls a story, characteristic of Darwin's innate modesty, told to the writer by the present John Murray. Darwin called on the elder Murray (presumably some time in 1880), and after fumbling in his coat-tail pocket, drew out a packet, which he handed to Murray with the timidity of an unfledged author submitting his first ma.n.u.script. "I have brought you," he said, "a little thing of mine on the action of worms on soil," and then paused as if in doubt whether Murray would care to run the risk of bringing out the book! One story leads to another, and our second relates to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey.

Among the signatures of members of Parliament, requesting Dean Bradley's consent to Darwin's interment there, was that of Mr. Richard B. Martin, partner in the well-known bank of that name, trading under the sign of the "Gra.s.shopper." In his history of this old inst.i.tution Mr. John B.

Martin prints the following letter, which was received on the 27th of April, 1882, the day after Darwin's funeral.--

SIRS--We have this day drawn a check for the sum of 280, which closes our account with your firm. Our reasons for thus closing an account opened so very many years ago are of so exceptional a kind that we are quite prepared to find that they are deemed wholly inadequate to the result.... They are entirely the presence of Mr.