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history of science has it happened that a great theory has been
nurtured in its author’s brain through infancy and adolescence to
its full legal majority before being sent out into the world.
Thus the fuse that led to the great powder-mine had been lighted.
The explosion itself came more than a year later, in November,
1859, when Darwin, after thirteen months of further effort,
completed the outline of his theory, which was at first begun as
an abstract for the Linnaean Society, but which grew to the size
of an independent volume despite his efforts at condensation, and
which was given that ever-to-be-famous title, The Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. And what an explosion it
was! The joint paper of 1858 had made a momentary flare, causing
the hearers, as Hooker said, to “speak of it with bated breath,”
but beyond that it made no sensation. What the result was when
the Origin itself appeared no one of our generation need be told.
The rumble and roar that it made in the intellectual world have
not yet altogether ceased to echo after more than forty years of
reverberation.
NEW CHAMPIONSTo the Origin of Species, then, and to its author, Charles
Darwin, must always be ascribed chief credit for that vast
revolution in the fundamental beliefs of our race which has come
about since 1859, and which made the second half of the century
memorable. But it must not be overlooked that no such sudden
metamorphosis could have been effected had it not been for the
aid of a few notable lieutenants, who rallied to the standards of
the leader immediately after the publication of the Origin.
Darwin had all along felt the utmost confidence in the ultimate
triumph of his ideas. “Our posterity,” he declared, in a letter
to Hooker, “will marvel as much about the current belief [in
special creation] as we do about fossil shells having been
thought to be created as we now see them.” But he fully realized
that for the present success of his theory of transmutation the
championship of a few leaders of science was all-essential. He
felt that if he could make converts of Hooker and Lyell and of
Thomas Henry Huxley at once, all would be well.
His success in this regard, as in others, exceeded his
expectations. Hooker was an ardent disciple from reading the
proof-sheets before the book was published; Lyell renounced his
former beliefs and fell into line a few months later; while
Huxley, so soon as he had mastered the central idea of natural
selection, marvelled that so simple yet all-potent a thought had
escaped him so long, and then rushed eagerly into the fray,
wielding the keenest dialectic blade that was drawn during the
entire controversy. Then, too, unexpected recruits were found in
Sir John Lubbock and John Tyndall, who carried the war eagerly
into their respective territories; while Herbert Spencer, who had
advocated a doctrine of transmutation on philosophic grounds some
years before Darwin published the key to the mystery—and who
himself had barely escaped independent discovery of that
key—lent his masterful influence to the cause. In America the
famous botanist Asa Gray, who had long been a correspondent of
Darwin’s but whose advocacy of the new theory had not been
anticipated, became an ardent propagandist; while in Germany
Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, the youthful but already noted zoologist,
took up the fight with equal enthusiasm.
Against these few doughty champions—with here and there another
of less general renown—was arrayed, at the outset, practically
all Christendom. The interest of the question came home to every
person of intelligence, whatever his calling, and the more deeply
as it became more and more clear how far-reaching are the real
bearings of the doctrine of natural selection. Soon it was seen
that should the doctrine of the survival of the favored races
through the struggle for existence win, there must come with it
as radical a change in man’s estimate of his own position as had
come in the day when, through the efforts of Copernicus and
Galileo, the world was dethroned from its supposed central
position in the universe. The whole conservative majority of
mankind recoiled from this necessity with horror. And this
conservative majority included not laymen merely, but a vast
preponderance of the leaders of science also.
With the open-minded minority, on the other hand, the theory of
natural selection made its way by leaps and bounds. Its
delightful simplicity—which at first sight made it seem neither
new nor important—coupled with the marvellous comprehensiveness
of its implications, gave it a hold on the imagination, and
secured it a hearing where other theories of transmutation of
species had been utterly scorned. Men who had found Lamarck’s
conception of change through voluntary effort ridiculous, and the
vaporings of the Vestiges altogether despicable, men whose
scientific cautions held them back from Spencer’s deductive
argument, took eager hold of that tangible, ever-present
principle of natural selection, and were led on and on to its
goal. Hour by hour the attitude of the thinking world towards
this new principle changed; never before was so great a
revolution wrought so suddenly.
Nor was this merely because “the times were ripe” or “men’s minds
prepared for evolution.” Darwin himself bears witness that this
was not altogether so. All through the years in which he brooded
this theory he sounded his scientific friends, and could find
among them not one who acknowledged a doctrine of transmutation.
The reaction from the standpoint of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin
and Goethe had been complete, and when Charles Darwin avowed his
own conviction he expected always to have it met with ridicule or
contempt. In 1857 there was but one man speaking with any large
degree of authority in the world who openly avowed a belief in
transmutation of species—that man being Herbert Spencer. But
the Origin of Species came, as Huxley has said, like a flash in
the darkness, enabling the benighted voyager to see the way. The
score of years during which its author had waited and worked had
been years well spent. Darwin had become, as he himself says, a
veritable Croesus, “overwhelmed with his riches in facts”—facts
of zoology, of selective artificial breeding, of geographical
distribution of animals, of embryology, of paleontology. He had
massed his facts about his theory, condensed them and
recondensed, until his volume of five hundred pages was an
encyclopaedia in scope. During those long years of musing he had
thought out almost every conceivable objection to his theory, and
in his book every such objection was stated with fullest force
and candor, together with such reply as the facts at command
might dictate. It was the force of those twenty years of effort
of a master-mind that made the sudden breach in the
breaswtork{sic} of current thought.
Once this breach was effected the work of conquest went rapidly
on. Day by day squads of the enemy capitulated and struck their
arms. By the time another score of years had passed the doctrine
of evolution had become the working hypothesis of the scientific
world. The revolution had been effected.
And from amid the wreckage of opinion and belief stands forth the
figure of Charles Darwin, calm, imperturbable, serene; scatheless
to ridicule, contumely, abuse; unspoiled by ultimate success;
unsullied alike by the strife and the victory—take him for all
in all, for character, for intellect, for what he was and what he
did, perhaps the most Socratic figure of the century. When, in
1882, he died, friend and foe alike conceded that one of the
greatest sons of men had rested from his labors, and all the
world felt it fitting that the remains of Charles Darwin should
be entombed in Westminster Abbey close beside the honored grave
of Isaac Newton. Nor were there many who would dispute the
justice of Huxley’s estimate of his accomplishment: “He found a
great truth trodden under foot. Reviled by bigots, and ridiculed
by all the world, he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his
own efforts, irrefragably established in science, inseparably
incorporated with the common thoughts of men, and only hated and
feared by those who would revile but dare not.”
THE ORIGIN OF THE FITTESTWide as are the implications of the great truth which Darwin and
his co-workers established, however, it leaves quite untouched
the problem of the origin of those “favored variations” upon
which it operates. That such variations are due to fixed and
determinate causes no one understood better than Darwin; but in
his original exposition of his doctrine he made no assumption as
to what these causes are. He accepted the observed fact of
variation—as constantly witnessed, for example, in the
differences between parents and offspring—and went ahead from
this assumption.
But as soon as the validity of the principle of natural selection
came to be acknowledged speculators began to search for the
explanation of those variations which, for purposes of argument,
had been provisionally called “spontaneous.” Herbert Spencer had
all along dwelt on this phase of the subject, expounding the
Lamarckian conceptions of the direct influence of the environment
(an idea which had especially appealed to Buffon and to Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire), and of effort in response to environment and
stimulus as modifying the individual organism, and thus supplying
the basis for the operation of natural selection. Haeckel also
became an advocate of this idea, and presently there arose a
so-called school of neo-Lamarckians, which developed particular
strength and prominence in America under the leadership of
Professors A. Hyatt and E. D. Cope.
But just as the tide of opinion was turning strongly in this
direction, an utterly unexpected obstacle appeared in the form of
the theory of Professor August Weismann, put forward in 1883,
which antagonized the Lamarckian conception (though not touching
the Darwinian, of which Weismann is a firm upholder) by denying
that individual variations, however acquired by the mature
organism, are transmissible. The flurry which this denial created
has not yet altogether subsided, but subsequent observations seem
to show that it was quite disproportionate to the real merits of
the case. Notwithstanding Professor Weismann’s objections, the
balance of evidence appears to favor the view that the Lamarckian
factor of acquired variations stands as the complement of the
Darwinian factor of natural selection in effecting the
transmutation of species.
Even though this partial explanation of what Professor Cope calls
the “origin of the fittest” be accepted, there still remains one
great life problem which the doctrine of evolution does not
touch. The origin of species, genera, orders, and classes of
beings through endless transmutations is in a sense explained;
but what of the first term of this long series? Whence came that
primordial organism whose transmuted descendants make up the
existing faunas and floras of the globe?
There was a time, soon after the doctrine of evolution gained a
hearing, when the answer to that question seemed to some
scientists of authority to have been given by experiment.
Recurring to a former belief, and repeating some earlier
experiments, the director of the Museum of Natural History at
Rouen, M. F. A. Pouchet, reached the conclusion that organic
beings are spontaneously generated about us constantly, in the
familiar processes of putrefaction, which were known to be due to
the agency of microscopic bacteria. But in 1862 Louis Pasteur
proved that this seeming spontaneous generation is in reality due
to the existence of germs in the air. Notwithstanding the
conclusiveness of these experiments, the claims of Pouchet were
revived in England ten years later by Professor Bastian; but then
the experiments of John Tyndall, fully corroborating the results
of Pasteur, gave a final quietus to the claim of “spontaneous
generation” as hitherto formulated.
There for the moment the matter rests. But the end is not
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