Charles Darwin

On February the 12th, 1809, Charles Darwin first saw the light of day in this his father's house at Shrewsbury. Time and place were both propitious. Born in a cultivated scientific family, surrounded from his birth by elevating influences, and secured beforehand from the cramping necessity of earning his own livelihood by his own exertions, the boy was destined to grow up to full maturity in the twenty-one years of slow development that immediately preceded the passing of the first Reform Act. The thunder of the great European upheaval had grown silent at Waterloo when he was barely six years old, and his boyhood was passed amid country sights and sounds during that long period of reconstruction and assimilation which followed the fierce volcanic outburst of the French Revolution. Happy in the opportunity of his birth, he came upon the world eight years after the first publication of Lamarck's remarkable speculations, and for the first twenty-two years of his life he was actually the far younger contemporary of the great French evolutionary philosopher. Eleven years before his arrival upon the scene Malthus had set forth his 'Principle of Population.' Charles Darwin thus entered upon a stage well prepared for him, and he entered it with an idiosyncrasy exactly adapted for making the best of the situation. The soil had been thoroughly turned and dressed beforehand: Charles Darwin's seed had only to fall upon it in order to spring up and bear fruit a hundredfold, in every field of science or speculation.

For it was not biology alone that he was foredoomed to revolutionise, but the whole range of human thought, and perhaps even ultimately of human action.

Is it mere national prejudice which makes one add with congratulatory pleasure that Darwin was born in England, rather than in France, in Germany, or in America? Perhaps so; perhaps not. For the English intellect does indeed seem more capable than most of uniting high speculative ability with high practical skill and experience: and of that union of rare qualities Darwin himself was a most conspicuous example. It is probable that England has produced more of the great organising and systematising intellects than any other modern country.

Among those thinkers in his own line who stood more nearly abreast of Darwin in the matter of age, Lyell was some eleven years his senior, and contributed not a little (though quite unconsciously) by his work and conclusions to the formation of Darwin's own peculiar scientific opinions. The veteran Owen, who still survives him, was nearly five years older than Darwin, and also helped to a great extent in giving form and exactness to his great contemporary's anatomical ideas. Humboldt, who preceded our English naturalist in the matter of time by no less than forty years, might yet almost rank as coeval in some respects, owing to his long and active life, his late maturity, and the very recent date of his greatest and most thought-compelling work, the 'Cosmos' (begun when Humboldt was seventy-five, and finished when he lacked but ten years of his century), in itself a sort of preparation for due acceptance of the Darwinian theories. In fact, as many as fifty years of their joint lives coincided entirely one with the other's. Agassiz antedated Darwin by two years. On the other hand, among the men who most helped on the recognition of Darwin's theories, Hooker and Lewes were his juniors by eight years, Herbert Spencer by eleven, Wallace by thirteen, and Huxley by sixteen. His cousin, Francis Galton, another grandson of Erasmus Darwin, and joint inheritor of the distinctive family biological ply, was born at the same date as Alfred Russell Wallace, thirteen years after Charles Darwin. In such a goodly galaxy of workers was the Darwinian light destined to shine through the middle of the century, as one star excelleth another in glory.

Charles Darwin was the second son: but nature refuses doggedly to acknowledge the custom of primogeniture. His elder brother, Erasmus, a man of mute and inarticulate ability, with a sardonic humour alien to his race, extorted unwonted praise from the critical pen of Thomas Carlyle, who 'for intellect rather preferred him to his brother Charles.' But whatever spark of the Darwinian genius was really innate in Erasmus the Less died with him unacknowledged.

The boy was educated (so they call it) at Shrewsbury Grammar School, under sturdy Sam Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield; and there he picked up so much Latin and Greek as was then considered absolutely essential to the due production of an English gentleman. Happily for the world, having no taste for the classics, he escaped the ordeal with little injury to his individuality. His mother had died while he was still a child, but his father, that 'acute observer,' no doubt taught him to know and love nature. At sixteen he went to Edinburgh University, then rendered famous by a little knot of distinguished professors, and there he remained for two years. Already at school he had made himself notable by his love of collecting – the first nascent symptom of the naturalist bent. He collected everything, shells, eggs, minerals, coins, nay, since postage stamps were then not yet invented, even franks. But at Edinburgh he gave the earliest distinct evidence of his definite scientific tastes by contributing to the local academic society a paper on the floating eggs of the common sea-mat, in which he had even then succeeded in discovering for the first time organs of locomotion. Thence he proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge. The Darwins were luckily a Cambridge family: luckily, let us say, for had it been otherwise – had young Darwin been distorted from his native bent by Plato and Aristotle, and plunged deep into the mysteries of Barbara and Celarent, as would infallibly have happened to him at the sister university – who can tell how long we might have had to wait in vain for the 'Origin of Species' and the 'Descent of Man'? But Cambridge, which rejoiced already in the glory of Newton, was now to match it by the glory of Darwin. In its academical course, the mathematical wedge had always kept open a dim passage for physical science; and at the exact moment when Darwin was an undergraduate at Christ's – from 1827 to 1831 – the university had the advantage of several good scientific teachers, and amongst them one, Professor Henslow, a well-known botanist, who took a special interest in young Darwin's intellectual development. There, too, he met with Sedgwick, Airy, Ramsay, and numerous other men of science, whose intercourse with him must no doubt have contributed largely to mould and form the future cast of his peculiar philosophical idiosyncrasy.

It was to Henslow's influence that Darwin in later years attributed in great part his powerful taste for natural history. But in truth the ascription of such high praise to his early teacher smacks too much of the Darwinian modesty to be accepted at once without demur by the candid critic. The naturalist, like the poet, is born, not made. How much more, then, must this needs be the case with the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and of Josiah Wedgwood? As a matter of fact, already at Edinburgh the lad had loved to spend his days among the sea-beasts and wrack of the Inches in the Firth of Forth; and it was through the instrumentality of his 'brother entomologists' that he first became acquainted with Henslow himself when he removed to Cambridge. The good professor could not make him into a naturalist: inherited tendencies and native energies had done that for him already from his very cradle.

'Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam;' and it was well that Darwin took up at Cambridge with the study of geology as his first love. For geology was then the living and moving science, as astronomy had been in the sixteenth century, and as biology is at the present day – the growing-point, so to speak, of European development, whence all great things might naturally be expected. Moreover, it was and is the central science of the concrete class, having relations with astronomy on the one hand, and with biology on the other; concerned alike with cosmical chances or changes on this side, and with the minutest facts of organic nature on that; the meeting-place and border-land of all the separate branches of study that finally bear upon the complex problems of our human life. No other subject of investigation was so well calculated to rouse Darwin's interest in the ultimate questions of evolution or creation, of sudden cataclysm or gradual growth, of miraculous intervention or slow development. Here, if anywhere, his enigmas were all clearly propounded to him by the inarticulate stony sphinxes; he had only to riddle them out for himself as he went along in after years with the aid of the successive side-lights thrown upon the world by the unconnected lanterns of Lamarck and of Malthus.

Fortunately for us, then, Darwin did not waste his time at Cambridge over the vain and frivolous pursuits of the classical tripos. He preferred to work at his own subjects in his own way, and to leave the short-lived honours of the schools to those who cared for them and for nothing higher. He came out with the οἱ πολλοί in 1831, and thenceforth proceeded to study life in the wider university for which his natural inclinations more properly fitted him. The world was all before him where to choose, and he chose that better part which shall not be taken away from him as long as the very memory of science survives.

CHAPTER IV

DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS

Scarcely had Darwin taken his pass degree at Cambridge when the great event of his life occurred which, more than anything else perhaps, gave the final direction to his categorical genius in the line it was thenceforth so successfully to follow. In the autumn of 1831, when Darwin was just twenty-two, it was decided by Government to send a ten-gun brig, the 'Beagle,' under command of Captain Fitzroy, to complete the unfinished survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, to map out the shores of Chili and Peru, to visit several of the Pacific archipelagoes, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the whole world. This was an essentially scientific expedition, and Captain Fitzroy, afterwards so famous as the meteorological admiral, was a scientific officer of the highest type. He was anxious to be accompanied on his cruise by a competent naturalist who would undertake the collection and preservation of the animals and plants discovered on the voyage, for which purpose he generously offered to give up a share of his own cabin accommodation. Professor Henslow seized upon the opportunity to recommend for the post his promising pupil, young Darwin, 'grandson of the poet.' Darwin gladly volunteered his services without salary, and partly paid his own expenses on condition of being permitted to retain in his own possession the animals and plants he collected on the journey. The 'Beagle' set sail from Devonport on December the 27th, 1831; she returned to Falmouth on October the 2nd, 1836.

That long five years' cruise around the world, the journal of which Darwin has left us in the 'Voyage of the "Beagle,"' proved a marvellous epoch in the great naturalist's quiet career. It left its abiding mark deeply imprinted on all his subsequent life and thinking. Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin were cabinet biologists, who had never beheld with their own eyes the great round world and all that therein is; Charles Darwin had the inestimable privilege of seeing for himself, at first hand, a large part of the entire globe and of the creatures that inhabit it. Even to have caught one passing glimpse of the teeming life of the tropics is in itself an education; to the naturalist it is more, it is a revelation. Our starved little northern fauna and flora, the mere leavings of the vast ice sheets that spread across our zone in the glacial epoch, show us a world depopulated of all its largest, strangest, and fiercest creatures; a world dwarfed in all its component elements, and immensely differing in ten thousand ways from that rich, luxuriant, over-stocked hot-house in which the first great problems of evolution were practically worked out by survival of the fittest. But the tropics preserve for us still in all their jungles something of the tangled, thickly-peopled aspect which our planet must have presented for countless ages in all latitudes before the advent of primæval man. We now know that throughout the greater part of geological time, essentially tropical conditions existed unbroken over the whole surface of the entire earth, from the Antarctic continent to the shores of Greenland; so that some immediate acquaintance at least with the equatorial world is of immense value to the philosophical naturalist for the sake of the analogies it inevitably suggests; and it is a significant fact that almost all those great and fruitful thinkers who in our own time have done good work in the wider combination of biological facts have themselves passed a considerable number of years in investigating the conditions of tropical nature. Europe and England are at the ends of the earth; the tropics are biological head-quarters. The equatorial zone is therefore the true school for the historian of life in its more universal and lasting aspects.

Nor was that all. The particular countries visited by the 'Beagle' during the course of her long and varied cruise happened to be exactly such as were naturally best adapted for bringing out the latent potentialities of Darwin's mind, and suggesting to his active and receptive brain those deep problems of life and its environment which he afterwards wrought out with such subtle skill and such consummate patience in the 'Origin of Species' and the 'Descent of Man.' The Cape de Verdes, and the other Atlantic islands, with their scanty population of plants and animals, composed for the most part of waifs and strays drifted to their barren rocks by ocean currents, or blown out helplessly to sea by heavy winds; Brazil, with its marvellous contrasting wealth of tropical luxuriance and self-strangling fertility, a new province of interminable delights to the soul of the enthusiastic young collector; the South American pampas, with their colossal remains of extinct animals, huge geological precursors of the stunted modern sloths and armadillos that still inhabit the self-same plains; Tierra del Fuego, with its almost Arctic climate, and its glimpses into the secrets of the most degraded savage types; the vast range of the Andes and the Cordilleras, with their volcanic energy and their closely crowded horizontal belts of climatic life; the South Sea Islands, those paradises of the Pacific, Hesperian fables true, alike for the lover of the picturesque and the biological student; Australia, that surviving fragment of an extinct world, with an antiquated fauna whose archaic character still closely recalls the European life of ten million years back in the secondary epoch: all these and many others equally novel and equally instructive passed in long alternating panorama before Darwin's eyes, and left their images deeply photographed for ever after on the lasting tablets of his retentive memory. That was the real great university in which he studied nature and read for his degree. Our evolutionist was now being educated.

Throughout the whole of the journal of this long cruise, which Darwin afterwards published in an enlarged form, it is impossible not to be struck at every turn with the way in which his inquisitive mind again and again recurs to the prime elements of those great problems towards whose solution he afterwards so successfully pointed out the path. The Darwinian ideas are all already there in the germ; the embryo form of the 'Origin of Species' plays in and out on every page with the quaintest elusiveness. We are always just on the very point of catching it; and every now and again we do actually all but catch it in essence and spirit, though ever still its bodily shape persistently evades us. Questions of geographical distribution, of geological continuity, of the influence of climate, of the modifiability of instinct, of the effects of surrounding conditions, absorb the young observer's vivid interest at every step, wherever he lands. He is all unconsciously collecting notes and materials in profuse abundance for his great work; he is thinking in rough outline the new thoughts which are hereafter to revolutionise the thought of humanity.

Five years are a great slice out of a man's life: those five years of ceaseless wandering by sea and land were spent by Charles Darwin in accumulating endless observations and hints for the settlement of the profound fundamental problems in which he was even then so deeply interested. The 'Beagle' sailed from England to the Cape de Verdes, and already, even before she had touched her first land, the young naturalist had observed with interest that the impalpably fine dust which fell on deck contained no less than sixty-seven distinct organic forms, two of them belonging to species peculiar to South America. In some of the dust he found particles of stone so very big that they measured 'above the thousandth of an inch square;' and after this fact, says the keen student, 'one need not be surprised at the diffusion of the far lighter and smaller sporules of cryptogamic plants.' Would Erasmus Darwin have noticed these minute points and their implications one wonders? Probably not. May we not see in the observation partly the hereditary tendencies of Josiah Wedgwood towards minute investigation and accuracy of detail, partly the influence of the scientific time-wave, and the careful training under Professor Henslow? Erasmus Darwin comes before us rather as the brilliant and ingenious amateur, his grandson Charles as the instructed and fully equipped final product of the scientific schools.

At St. Paul's Rocks, once more, a mass of new volcanic peaks rising abruptly from the midst of the Atlantic, the naturalist of the 'Beagle' notes with interest that feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic insects or spiders are the first inhabitants to take up their quarters on recently formed oceanic islands. This problem of the peopling of new lands, indeed, so closely connected with the evolution of new species, necessarily obtruded itself upon his attention again and again during his five years' cruise; and in some cases, especially that of the Galapagos Islands, the curious insular faunas and floras which he observed upon this trip, composed as they were of mere casual straylings from adjacent shores, produced upon his mind a very deep and lasting impression, whose traces one may without difficulty discern on every second page of the 'Origin of Species.'

On the last day of February, 1832, the 'Beagle' came to anchor in the harbour of Bahia, and young Darwin caught sight for the first time of the mutually strangling luxuriance of tropical vegetation. Nowhere on earth are the finest conditions of tropical life more fully realised than in the tangled depths of the great uncleared Brazilian forests, which everywhere gird round like a natural palisade with their impenetrable belt the narrow and laborious clearings of over-mastered man. The rich alluvial silt of mighty river systems, the immemorial manuring of the virgin soil, the fierce energy of an almost equatorial sun, and the universal presence of abundant water, combine to make life in that marvellous region unusually wealthy, varied, and crowded, so that the struggle for existence is there perhaps more directly visible to the seeing eye than in any other known portion of God's universe. 'Delight itself,' says Darwin in his journal, with that naive simplicity which everywhere forms the chief charm of his direct and unaffected literary style – 'delight itself is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who for the first time has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration.' In truth, among those huge buttressed trunks, overhung by the unbroken canopy of foliage on the vast spreading and interlacing branches, festooned with lianas and drooping lichens, or beautified by the pendent alien growth of perfumed orchids, Darwin's mind must indeed have found congenial food for apt reflection, and infinite opportunities for inference and induction. Prom the mere picturesque point of view, indeed, the naturalist enjoys such sights as this a thousand times more truly and profoundly than the mere casual unskilled observer: for it is a shallow, self-flattering mistake of vulgar and narrow minds to suppose that fuller knowledge and clearer insight can destroy or impair the beauty of beautiful objects – as who should imagine that a great painter appreciates the sunset less than a silly boy or a sentimental schoolgirl. As a matter of fact, the naturalist knows and admires a thousand exquisite points of detail in every flower and every insect which only he himself and the true artist can equally delight in. And a keen intellectual and æsthetic joy in the glorious fecundity and loveliness of nature was everywhere present to Darwin's mind. But, beyond and above even that, there was also the architectonic delight of the great organiser in the presence of a noble organised product: the peculiar pleasure felt only by the man in whose broader soul all minor details fall at once into their proper place, as component elements in one great consistent and harmonious whole – a sympathetic pleasure akin to that with which an architect views the interior of Ely and of Lincoln, or a musician listens to the linked harmonies of the 'Messiah' and the 'Creation.' The scheme of nature was now unfolding itself visibly and clearly before Charles Darwin's very eyes.

After eighteen memorable days spent with unceasing delight at Bahia, the 'Beagle' sailed again for Rio, where Darwin stopped for three months, to improve his acquaintance with the extraordinary wealth of the South American fauna and flora. Collecting insects was here his chief occupation, and it is interesting to note even at this early period how his attention was attracted by some of those strange alluring devices on the part of the males for charming their partners which afterwards formed the principal basis for his admirable theory of sexual selection, so fully developed in the 'Descent of Man.' 'Several times,' he says, 'when a pair [of butterflies], probably male and female, were chasing each other in an irregular course, they passed within a few yards of me; and I distinctly heard a clicking noise, similar to that produced by a toothed wheel passing under a spring catch.' In like manner he observed here the instincts of tropical ants, the habits of phosphorescent insects, and the horrid practice of that wasp-like creature, the sphex, which stuffs the clay cells of its larvæ full of half-dead spiders and writhing caterpillars, so stung with devilish avoidance of vital parts as to be left quite paralysed yet still alive, as future food for the developing grubs. Cases like these helped naturally to shake the young biologist's primitive faith in the cheap and crude current theories of universal beneficence, and to introduce that wholesome sceptical reaction against received dogma which is the necessary ground-work and due preparation for all great progressive philosophical thinking.

In July they set sail again for Monte Video, where the important question of climate and vegetation began to interest young Darwin's mind. Uruguay is almost entirely treeless; and this curious phenomenon, in a comparatively moist sub-tropical plain-land, struck him as a remarkable anomaly, and set him speculating on its probable cause. Australia, he remembered, was far more arid, and yet its interior was everywhere covered by whole forests of quaint indigenous gum-trees. Could it be that there were no trees adapted to the climate? As yet, the true causes of geographical distribution had not clearly dawned upon Darwin's mind; but that a young man of twenty-three should seriously busy himself about such problems of ultimate causation at all is in itself a sufficiently pointed and remarkable phenomenon. It was here, too, that he first saw that curious animal, the Tucutuco, a true rodent with the habits of a mole, which is almost always found in a blind condition. With reference to this singular creature, there occurs in his journal one of those interesting anticipatory passages which show the rough workings of the distinctive evolutionary Darwinian concept in its earlier stages. 'Considering the strictly subterranean habits of the Tucutuco,' he writes, 'the blindness, though so common, cannot be a very serious evil; yet it appears strange that any animal should possess an organ frequently subject to be injured. Lamarck would have been delighted with this fact, had he known it, when speculating (probably with more truth than usual with him) on the gradually acquired blindness of the Aspalax, a gnawer living under the ground, and of the Proteus, a reptile living in dark caverns filled with water; in both of which animals the eye is in an almost rudimentary state, and is covered by a tendinous membrane and skin. In the common mole the eye is extraordinarily small but perfect, though many anatomists doubt whether it is connected with the true optic nerve; its vision must certainly be imperfect, though probably useful to the animal when it leaves its burrow. In the Tucutuco, which I believe never comes to the surface of the ground, the eye is rather larger, but often rendered blind and useless, though without apparently causing any inconvenience to the animal: no doubt Lamarck would have said that the Tucutuco is now passing into the state of the Aspalax and Proteus.' The passage is instructive both as showing that Darwin was already familiar with Lamarck's writings, and as pointing out the natural course of his own future development.

For the two years from her arrival at Monte Video, the 'Beagle' was employed in surveying the eastern coast of South America; and Darwin enjoyed unusual opportunities for studying the geology, the zoology, and the botany of the surrounding districts during all that period. It was a suggestive field indeed for the young naturalist. The curious relationship of the gigantic fossil armour-plated animals to the existing armadillo, of the huge megatherium to the modern sloths, and of the colossal ant-eaters to their degenerate descendants at the present day, formed one of the direct inciting causes to the special study which produced at last the 'Origin of Species.' In the Introduction to that immortal work Darwin wrote, some twenty-seven years later, 'When on board H.M.S. "Beagle" as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.' And in the body of the work itself he refers over and over again to numberless observations made by himself during this period of rapid psychological development – observations on the absence of recent geological formations along the lately upheaved South American coast; on the strange extinction of the horse in La Plata; on the affinities of the extinct and recent species; on the effect of minute individual peculiarities in preserving life under special circumstances; and on the influence of insects and blood-sucking bats in determining the existence of the larger naturalised mammals in parts of Brazil and the Argentine Republic. It was the epoch of wide collection of facts, to be afterwards employed in brilliant generalisations: the materials for the 'Origin of Species' were being slowly accumulated in the numberless pigeon-holes of the Darwinian memory.

Among the facts thus industriously gathered by Darwin in the two years spent on the South American coast were several curious instincts of the cuckoo-like molothrus, of the owl of the Pampas, and of the American ostrich. A few sentences scattered here and there through this part of the 'Naturalist's Journal' may well be extracted in the present place as showing, better than any mere secondhand description could do, the slow germinating process of the 'Origin of Species.' In speaking of the toxodon, that strange extinct South American mammal, the young author remarks acutely that, though in size it equalled the elephant and the megatherium, the structure of its teeth shows it to be closely allied to the ruminants, while several other details link it to the pachyderms, and its aquatic peculiarities of ear and nostril approximate it rather to the manatee and the dugong. 'How wonderfully,' he says, 'are the different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in different points of the structure of the toxodon.' We now know that unspecialised ancestral forms always display this close union of peculiarities afterwards separately developed in distinct species of their later descendants.

Still more pregnant with evolutionism in the bud is the prophetic remark about a certain singular group of South American birds, 'This small family is one of those which, from its varied relations to other families, although at present offering only difficulties to the systematic naturalist, ultimately may assist in revealing the grand scheme, common to the present and past ages, on which organised beings have been created.' Of the agouti, once more, that true friend of the desert, Darwin notes that it does not now range as far south as Port St. Julian, though Wood in 1670 found it abundant there; and he asks suggestively, 'What cause can have altered, in a wide, uninhabited, and rarely visited country, the range of an animal like this?' Again, when speaking of the analogies between the extinct camel-like macrauchenia and the modern guanaco, as well as of those between the fossil and living species of South American rodents, he says, with even more prophetic insight, 'This wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.' He was himself destined in another thirty years to prove the truth of his own vaticination.

A yet more remarkable passage in the 'Journal of the "Beagle,"' though entered under the account of events observed in the year 1834, must almost certainly have been written somewhat later, and subsequently to Darwin's first reading of Malthus's momentous work, 'The Principle of Population,' which (as we know from his own pen) formed a cardinal point in the great biologist's mental development. It runs as follows in the published journal:[1 - The full narrative was first given to the world in 1839, some three years after Darwin's return to England, so that much of it evidently represents the results of his maturer thinking and reading on the facts collected during his journey round the world.]– 'We do not steadily bear in mind how profoundly ignorant we are of the conditions of existence of every animal; nor do we always remember that some check is constantly preventing the too rapid increase of every organised being left in a state of nature. The supply of food, on an average, remains constant; yet the tendency in every animal to increase by propagation is geometrical, and its surprising effects have nowhere been more astonishingly shown than in the case of the European animals run wild during the last few centuries in America. Every animal in a state of nature regularly breeds; yet in a species long established any great increase in numbers is obviously impossible, and must be checked by some means.' Aut Malthus aut Diabolus. And surely here, if anywhere at all, we tremble on the very verge of natural selection.

It would be impossible to follow young Darwin in detail through his journey to Buenos Ayres, and up the Parana to Santa Fé, which occupied the autumn of 1833. In the succeeding year he visited Patagonia and the Falkland Islands, having previously made his first acquaintance with savage life among the naked Fuegians of the extreme southern point of the continent. Some of these interesting natives, taken to England by Captain Fitzroy on a former visit, had accompanied the 'Beagle' through all her wanderings, and from them Darwin obtained that close insight into the workings of savage human nature which he afterwards utilised with such conspicuous ability in the 'Descent of Man.' Through Magellan's Straits the party made their way up the coasts of Chili, and Darwin had there an opportunity of investigating the geology and biology of the Cordillera. The year 1835 was chiefly spent in that temperate country and in tropical Peru; and as the autumn went on, the 'Beagle' made her way across a belt of the Pacific to the Galapagos archipelago.

Small and unimportant as are those little equatorial islands from the geographical and commercial point of view, they will yet remain for ever classic ground to the biologists of the future from their close connection with the master-problems of the 'Origin of Species.' Here more, perhaps, than anywhere else the naturalist of the 'Beagle' found himself face to face in real earnest with the ultimate questions of creation or evolution. A group of tiny volcanic islets, never joined to any land, nor even united to one another, yet each possessing its own special zoological features – the Galapagos roused to an extraordinary degree the irresistible questionings of Darwin's mind. They contain no frogs, and no mammal save a mouse, brought to them, no doubt, by some passing ship. The only insects are beetles, which possess peculiar facilities for being transported in the egg or grub across salt water upon floating logs. There are two kinds of snake, one tortoise, and four lizards; but, in striking contrast to this extreme poverty of terrestrial forms, there are at least fifty-five distinct species of native birds. A few snails complete the list. Now most of these animals, though closely resembling the fauna of Ecuador, the nearest mainland, are specifically distinct; they have varied (as we now know) from their continental types owing to natural selection under the new circumstances in which they have been placed. But Darwin had not yet evolved that potent key to the great riddle of organic existence. He saw the problem, but not its solution. 'Most of the organic productions,' he says plainly, 'are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands: yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width… Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken sea was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time we seem to be brought somewhat nearer to that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.' Among the most singular of these zoological facts may be mentioned the existence in the Galapagos archipelago of a genus of gigantic and ugly lizard, the amblyrhyncus, unknown elsewhere, but here assuming the forms of two species, the one marine and the other terrestrial. In minuter points, the differences of fauna and flora between the various islands are simply astounding, so as to compel the idea that each form must necessarily have been developed not merely for the group, but for the special island which it actually inhabits. No wonder that Darwin should say in conclusion, 'One is astonished at the amount of creative force, if such an expression may be used, displayed on these small, barren, and rocky islands; and still more so at its diverse, yet analogous, action on points so near each other.' Here again, in real earnest, the young observer trembles visibly on the very verge of natural selection. In the 'Origin of Species' he makes full use, more than once, of the remarkable facts he observed with so much interest in these tiny isolated oceanic specks of the American galaxy.

From the Galapagos the 'Beagle' steered a straight course for Tahiti, and Darwin then beheld with his own eyes the exquisite beauty of the Polynesian Islands. Thence they sailed for New Zealand, the most truly insular large mass of land in the whole world, supplied accordingly with a fauna and flora of most surprising meagreness and poverty of species. In the woods, our observer noted very few birds, and he remarks with astonishment that so big an island – as large as Great Britain – should not possess a single living indigenous mammal, save a solitary rat of doubtful origin. Australia and Tasmania, with their antiquated and stranded marsupial inhabitants, almost completed the round trip. Keeling Island next afforded a basis for the future famous observations upon coral reefs; and thence by Mauritius, St. Helena, Ascension, Bahia, Pernambuco, and the beautiful Azores, the 'Beagle' made her way home by slow stages to England, which she reached in safety on October the 2nd, 1836. What an ideal education for the future reconstructor of biological science! He had now all his problems cut and dried, ready to his hand, and he had nothing important left to do – except to sit down quietly in his study, and proceed to solve them. Observation and collection had given him one half the subject-matter of the 'Origin of Species;' reflection and Malthus were to give him the other half. Never had great mind a nobler chance; never, again, had noble chance a great mind better adapted by nature and heredity to make the most of it. The man was not wanting to the opportunity, nor was the opportunity wanting to the man. Organism and environment fell together into perfect harmony; and so, by a lucky combination of circumstances, the secret of the ages was finally wrung from not unwilling nature by the far-seeing and industrious volunteer naturalist of the 'Beagle' expedition.

It would be giving a very false idea of the interests which stirred Charles Darwin's mind during his long five years' voyage, however, if we were to dwell exclusively upon the biological side of his numerous observations on that memorable cruise. Ethnology, geology, oceanic phenomena, the height of the snow-line, the climate of the Antarctic islands, the formation of icebergs, the transport of boulders, the habits and manners engendered by slavery, all almost equally aroused in their own way the young naturalist's vivid interest. Nowhere do we get the faintest trace of narrow specialism; nowhere are we cramped within the restricted horizon of the mere vulgar beetle-hunter and butterfly-catcher. The biologist of the 'Beagle' had taken the whole world of science for his special province. Darwin's mind with all its vastness was not, indeed, profoundly analytical. The task of working out the psychological and metaphysical aspects of evolution fell rather to the great organising and systematising intellect of Herbert Spencer. But within the realm of material fact, and of the widest possible inferences based upon such fact, Darwin's keen and comprehensive spirit ranged freely over the whole illimitable field of nature. 'No one,' says Buckle with unwonted felicity, 'can have a firm grasp of any science if, by confining himself to it, he shuts out the light of analogy. He may, no doubt, work at the details of his subject; he may be useful in adding to its facts; he will never be able to enlarge its philosophy. For the philosophy of every department depends on its connection with other departments, and must therefore be sought at their points of contact. It must be looked for in the place where they touch and coalesce: it lies, not in the centre of each science, but on the confines and margin.' This profound truth Darwin fully and instinctively realised. It was the all-embracing catholicity of his manifold interests that raised him into the greatest pure biologist of all time, and that enabled him to co-ordinate with such splendid results the raw data of so many distinct and separate sciences. And even as early as the days of the cruise in the 'Beagle,' that innate catholicity had already asserted itself in full vigour. Now it is a party of Gauchos throwing the bola that engages for the moment his eager attention; and now again it is a group of shivering Fuegians, standing naked with their long hair streaming in the wind on a snowy promontory of their barren coast. Here he examines the tubular lightning-holes melted in the solid rock of Maldonado by the electric energy; and there he observes the moving boulder-streams that course like torrents down the rugged corries of the Falkland Islands. At one time he works upon the unstudied geology of the South American Pampas; at another, he inspects the now classical lagoon and narrow fringing reef of the Keeling archipelago. Everywhere he sees whatever of most noteworthy in animate or inanimate nature is there to be seen; and everywhere he draws from it innumerable lessons, to be applied hereafter to the special field of study upon which his intense and active energies were finally concentrated. It is not too much to say, indeed, that it was the voyage of the 'Beagle' which gave us in the last resort the 'Origin of Species' and its great fellow the 'Descent of Man.'

CHAPTER V

THE PERIOD OF INCUBATION

When Charles Darwin landed in England on his return from the voyage of the 'Beagle' he was nearly twenty-eight. When he published the first edition of the 'Origin of Species' he was over fifty. The intermediate years, though much occupied by many minor works of deep specialist scientific importance, were still mainly devoted to collecting material for the one crowning effort of his life, the chief monument of his great co-ordinating and commanding intellect – the settlement of the question of organic evolution.

'There is one thing,' says Professor Fiske, 'which a man of original scientific or philosophical genius in a rightly ordered world should never be called upon to do. He should never be called upon to earn a living; for that is a wretched waste of energy, in which the highest intellectual power is sure to suffer serious detriment, and runs the risk of being frittered away into hopeless ruin.' From this unhappy necessity Charles Darwin, like his predecessor Lyell, was luckily free. He settled down early in a home of his own, and worked away at his own occupations, with no sordid need for earning the day's bread, but with perfect leisure to carry out the great destiny for which the chances of the universe had singled him out. His subsequent history is the history of his wonderful and unique contributions to natural science.

The first thing to be done, of course, was the arrangement and classification of the natural history spoils gathered during the cruise, and the preparation of his own journal of the voyage for publication. The strict scientific results of the trip were described in the 'Zoology of the Voyage of the "Beagle,"' the different parts of which were undertaken by rising men of science of the highest distinction, under Charles Darwin's own editorship. Sir Richard Owen took in hand the fossil mammals; Waterhouse arranged their living allies; Gould discussed the birds, Jenyns the fish, and Bell the amphibians and reptiles. In this vast co-operative publication Darwin thus obtained the assistance of many among the most competent specialists in the England of his day, and learned to understand his own collections by the light thrown upon them from the focussed lamps of the most minute technical learning. As for the journal, it was originally published with the general account of the cruise by Captain Fitzroy in 1839, but was afterwards set forth in a separate form under the title of 'A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World.'

But while Darwin was thus engaged in arranging and classifying the animals and plants he had brought home with him, the germs of those inquiring ideas about the origin of species which we have already observed in his account of the voyage were quickening into fresh life within him. As he ruminated at his leisure over the results of his accumulations, he was beginning to work upon the great problem with the definite and conscious resolution of solving it. 'On my return home, it occurred to me,' he says, 'in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work, I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions that then seemed to me probable; from that period to the present day [1859] I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.'

So Darwin wrote at fifty. The words are weighty and well worthy of consideration. They give us in a nutshell the true secret of Darwin's success in compelling the attention and assent of his contemporaries to his completed theory. For speculations and hypotheses like those of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, however brilliant and luminous they may be, the hard, dry, scientific mind cares as a rule less than nothing. Men of genius and insight like Goethe and Oken may, indeed, seize greedily upon the pregnant suggestion; their intellects are already attuned by nature to its due reception and assimilation; but the mere butterfly-catchers and plant-hunters of the world, with whom after all rests ultimately the practical acceptance or rejection of such a theory, can only be convinced by long and patient accumulations of facts, by infinite instances and endless examples, by exhaustive surveys of the whole field of nature in a thousand petty details piecemeal. They have to be driven by repeated beating into the right path. Everywhere they fancy they see the loophole of an objection, which must be carefully closed beforehand against them with anticipatory argument, as we close hedges by the wayside against the obtrusive donkey with a cautious bunch of thorny brambles. Even if Charles Darwin had hit upon the fundamental idea of natural selection, and had published it, as Wallace did, in the form of a mere splendid aperçu, he would never have revolutionised the world of biology. When the great discovery was actually promulgated, it was easy enough to win the assent of philosophical thinkers like Herbert Spencer; easy enough, even, to gain the ready adhesion of non-biological but kindred minds, like Leslie Stephen's and John Morley's; those might all, perhaps, have been readily convinced by far less heavy and crushing artillery than that so triumphantly marshalled together in the 'Origin of Species.' But in order to command the slow and grudging adhesion of the rank and file of scientific workers, the 'hodmen of science,' as Professor Huxley calls them, it was needful to bring together an imposing array of closely serried facts, to secure every post in the rear before taking a single step onward, and to bring to bear upon every antagonist the exact form of argument with which he was already thoroughly familiar. It was by carefully pursuing these safe and cautious philosophical tactics that Charles Darwin gained his great victory. Where others were pregnant, he was cogent. He met the Dryasdusts of science on their own ground, and he put them fairly to flight with their own weapons. More than that, he brought them all over in the long run as deserters into his own camp, and converted them from doubtful and suspicious foes into warm adherents of the evolutionary banner.

Moreover, fortunately for the world, Darwin's own mind was essentially one of the inductive type. If a great deductive thinker and speculator like Herbert Spencer had hit upon the self-same idea of survival of the fittest, he might have communicated it to a small following of receptive disciples, who would have understood it and accepted it, on a priori grounds alone, and gradually passed it on to the grades beneath them; but he would never have touched the slow and cautious elephantine intellect of the masses. The common run of mankind are not deductive; they require to have everything made quite clear to them by example and instance. The English intelligence in particular shows itself as a rule congenitally incapable of appreciating the superior logical certitude of the deductive method. Englishmen will not even believe that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the squares on the containing sides until they have measured and weighed as well as they are able by rude experimental devices a few selected pieces of rudely shaped rectangular paper. It was a great gain, therefore, that the task of reconstructing the course of organic evolution should fall to the lot of a highly trained and masterly intelligence of the inductive order. Darwin had first to convince himself, and then he could proceed to convince the world. He set about the task with characteristic patience and thoroughness. No man that ever lived possessed in a more remarkable degree than he did the innate capacity for taking trouble. For five years, as a mere preliminary, he accumulated facts in immense variety, and then for the first time and in the vaguest possible way he – 'allowed himself to speculate.' That brings us down to the year 1842, when the first notes of the 'Origin of Species' must have been tentatively committed to paper. It was in 1859 that the first edition of the complete work was given to the world. Compare this with the case of Newton, who similarly kept his grand idea of gravitation for many years in embryo, until more exact measurements of the moon's mass and distance should enable him to verify it to his own satisfaction.

One other item of immense importance in the genesis of the full Darwinian doctrine deserves mention here – I mean, the exact moment of time occupied by Charles Darwin in the continuous history of scientific thought. A generation or two earlier, in Erasmus Darwin's days, biology had not yet arrived at the true classification of animals and plants upon an essentially hereditary basis. The Linnæan arrangement, then universally accepted, was wholly artificial in its main features; it distributed species without regard to their fundamental likenesses of structure and organisation. But the natural system of Jussieu and De Candolle, by arranging plants into truly related groups, made possible the proofs of an order of affiliation in the vegetable kingdom; while Cuvier's similar reconstruction of the animal world gave a like foothold to the evolutionary philosopher in the other great department of organic nature. The recognition of kinship between the various members of the same family necessarily preceded the establishment of a regular genealogical theory of life in its entirety.

Though we are here concerned mainly with Charles Darwin the thinker and writer – not with Charles Darwin the husband and father – a few words of explanation as to his private life must necessarily be added at the present point, before we pass on to consider the long, slow, and cautious brewing of that wonderful work, the 'Origin of Species,' Darwin returned home from the voyage of the 'Beagle' at the end of the year 1836. Soon after, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, no doubt through the influence of his friend Lyell, who was quite enthusiastic over his splendid geological investigations on the rate of elevation in the Pampas and the Cordillera. Acting on Lyell's advice, too, he determined to seek no official appointment, but to devote himself entirely for the rest of his life to the pursuit of science. In 1838, at the age of twenty-nine, he read before the Geological Society his paper on the 'Connection of Volcanic Phenomena with the Elevation of Mountain Chains,' when, says Lyell admiringly in a private letter, 'he opened upon De la Beche, Phillips, and others' – the veterans of the science – 'his whole battery of the earthquakes and volcanoes of the Andes.' Shortly after, the audacious young man was appointed secretary to the Geological Society, a post which he filled when the voyage of the 'Beagle' was first published in 1839.

In the early part of that same year, the rising naturalist took to himself a wife from one of the houses to which he himself owed no small part of his conspicuous greatness. His choice fell upon his cousin, Miss Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, of Maer Hall; and, after three years of married life in London, he settled at last at Down House, near Orpington, in Kent, where for the rest of his days he passed his time among his conservatories and his pigeons, his garden and his fowls, with his children growing up quietly beside him, and the great thinking world of London within easy reach of a few minutes' journey. His private means enabled him to live the pleasant life of an English country gentleman, and devote himself unremittingly to the pursuit of science. Ill health, indeed, interfered sadly with his powers of work; but system and patience did wonders during his working days, which were regularly parcelled out between study and recreation, and utilised and economised in the very highest possible degree. Early to bed and early to rise, wandering unseen among the lanes and paths, or riding slowly on his favourite black cob, the great naturalist passed forty years happily and usefully at Down, where all the village knew and loved him. A man of singular simplicity and largeness of heart, Charles Darwin never really learnt to know his own greatness. And that charming innocence and ignorance of his real value made the value itself all the greater. His moral qualities, indeed, were no less admirable and unique in their way than his intellectual faculties. To that charming candour and delightful unostentatiousness which everybody must have noticed in his published writings, he united in private life a kindliness of disposition, a width of sympathy, and a ready generosity which made him as much beloved by his friends as he was admired and respected by all Europe. The very servants who came beneath his roof stopped there for the most part during their whole lifetime. In his earlier years at Down, the quiet Kentish home was constantly enlivened by the visits of men like Lyell, Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and Wollaston. During his later days, it was the Mecca of a world-wide scientific and philosophic pilgrimage, where all the greatest men our age has produced sought at times the rare honour of sitting before the face of the immortal master. But to the very last Darwin himself never seemed to discover that he was anything more than just an average man of science among his natural peers.

Shortly after Darwin went to Down he began one long and memorable experiment, which in itself casts a flood of light upon his patient and painstaking method of inquiry. Two years before, he had read at the Geological Society a paper on the 'Formation of Mould,' which more than thirty years later he expanded into his famous treatise on the 'Action of Earthworms.' His uncle and father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, suggested to him that the apparent sinking of stones on the surface might really be due to earthworm castings. So, as soon as he had some land of his own to experiment upon, he began, in 1842, to spread broken chalk over a field at Down, in which, twenty-nine years later, in 1871, a trench was dug to test the results. What other naturalist ever waited so long and so patiently to discover the upshot of a single experiment? Is it wonderful that a man who worked like that should succeed, not by faith but by logical power, in removing mountains?

Unfortunately, we do not know the exact date when Darwin first read Malthus. But that the perusal of that remarkable book formed a crisis and turning-point in his mental development we know from his own distinct statement in a letter to Haeckel, prefixed to the brilliant German evolutionist's 'History of Creation.' 'It seemed to me probable,' says Darwin, speaking of his own early development, 'that allied species were descended from a common ancestor. But during several years I could not conceive how each form could have been modified so as to become admirably adapted to its place in nature. I began therefore to study domesticated animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceived that man's power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals was the most powerful of all means in the production of new races. Having attended to the habits of animals and their relations to the surrounding conditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle for existence to which all organisms are subjected; and my geological observations had allowed me to appreciate to a certain extent the duration of past geological periods. With my mind thus prepared I fortunately happened to read Malthus's "Essay on Population" and the idea of natural selection through the struggle for existence at once occurred to me. Of all the subordinate points in the theory, the last which I understood was the cause of the tendency in the descendants from a common progenitor to diverge in character.'

It is impossible, indeed, to overrate the importance of Malthus, viewed as a schoolmaster to bring men to Darwin, and to bring Darwin himself to the truth. Without the 'Essay on the Principle of Population' it is quite conceivable that we should never have had the 'Origin of Species' or the 'Descent of Man.'

At the same time, Darwin had not been idle in other departments of scientific work. Side by side with his collections for his final effort he had been busy on his valuable treatise upon Coral Reefs, in which he proved, mainly from his own observations on the Keeling archipelago, that atolls owe their origin to a subsidence of the supporting ocean-floor, the rate of upward growth of the reefs keeping pace on the whole with the gradual depression of the sea-bottom. 'No more admirable example of scientific method,' says Professor Geikie forty years later, 'was ever given to the world; and even if he had written nothing else, this treatise alone would have placed Darwin in the very front of investigators of nature.' But, from our present psychological and historical point of view, as a moment in the development of Darwin's influence, and therefore of the evolutionary impulse in general, it possesses a still greater and more profound importance, because the work in which the theory is unfolded forms a perfect masterpiece of thorough and comprehensive inductive method, and gained for its author a well-deserved reputation as a sound and sober scientific inquirer. The acquisition of such a reputation, afterwards increased by the publication of the monograph on the Family Cirripedia (in 1851), proved of immense use to Charles Darwin in the fierce battle which was to rage around the unconscious body of the 'Origin of Species.' To be 'sound' is everywhere of incalculable value; to have approved oneself to the slow and cautious intelligence of the Philistine classes is a mighty spear and shield for a strong man; but in England, and above all in scientific England, it is absolutely indispensable to the thinker who would accomplish any great revolution. Soundness is to the world of science what respectability is to the world of business – the sine qua non for successfully gaining even a hearing from established personages.

To read the book on Coral Reefs is indeed to take a lesson of the deepest value in applied inductive canons. Every fact is duly marshalled: every conclusion is drawn by the truest and most legitimate process from careful observation or crucial experiment. Bit by bit, Darwin shows most admirably that, through gradual submergence, fringing reefs are developed into barrier-reefs, and these again into atolls or lagoon islands; and incidentally he throws a vivid light on the slow secular movements upward or downward for ever taking place in the world's crust. But the value of the work as a geological record, great as it is, is as nothing compared with its value as a training exercise in inductive logic. Darwin was now learning by experience how to use his own immense powers.

Meanwhile, the environment too had been gradually moving. In 1832, the year after young Darwin set out upon his cruise, Lyell published the first edition of his 'Principles of Geology,' establishing once for all the uniformitarian concept of that branch of science. In 1836, the year when he returned, Rafinesque, in his 'New Flora of North America,' had accepted within certain cramping limits the idea that 'all species might once have been varieties, and that many varieties are gradually becoming species by assuming constant and peculiar characters.' Haldeman in Boston, and Grant at University College, London, were teaching from their professorial chairs the self-same novel and revolutionary doctrine. At last, in 1844, Robert Chambers published anonymously his famous and much-debated 'Vestiges of Creation,' which brought down the question of evolution versus creation from the senate of savants to the arena of the mere general public, and set up at once a universal fever of inquiry into the mysterious question of the origin of species. Chambers himself was a man rather of general knowledge and some native philosophical insight than of any marked scientific accuracy or depth. His work in its original form displayed comparatively little acquaintance with the vast groundwork of the question at issue – zoological, botanical, geological, and so forth – and in Charles Darwin's own opinion showed 'a great want of scientific caution.' But its graphic style, its vivid picturesqueness, and to the world at large the startling novelty of its brilliant and piquant suggestions, made it burst at once into an unwonted popularity for a work of so distinctly philosophical a character. In nine years it leaped rapidly through no less than ten successive editions, and remained until the publication of the 'Origin of Species' the chief authoritative exponent in England of the still struggling evolutionary principle.

The 'Vestiges of Creation' may be succinctly described as Lamarck and water, the watery element being due in part to the unnecessary obtrusion (more Scotico) of a metaphysical and theological principle into the physical universe. Chambers himself, in his latest edition (before the book was finally killed by the advent of Darwinism), thus briefly describes his main concepts: 'The several series of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, under the providence of God, the results, first, of an impulse which has been imparted to the forms of life, advancing them, in definite times, by generation, through grades of organisation, terminating in the highest dicotyledons and vertebrata, these grades being few in number, and generally marked by intervals of organic character, which we find to be a practical difficulty in ascertaining affinities; second, of another impulse connected with the vital forces, tending, in the course of generations, to modify organic structures in accordance with external circumstances, as food, the nature of the habitat, and the meteoric agencies.' Now it is clear at once that these two supposed 'impulses' are really quite miraculous in their essence. They do not help us at all to a distinct physical and realisable conception of any natural agency whereby species became differentiated one from the other. They lay the whole burden of species-making upon a single primordial supernatural impetus, imparted to the first living germ by the will of the Creator, and acting ever since continuously it is true, but none the less miraculously for all that. For many creations Chambers substitutes one single long creative nisus: where Darwin saw natural selection, his Scotch predecessor saw a deus ex machina, helping on the course of organic development by a constant but unseen interference from above. He supposed evolution to be predetermined by some intrinsic and externally implanted proclivity. In short, Chambers's theory is Lamarck's theologised, and spoilt in the process.

The book had nevertheless a most prodigious and perfectly unprecedented success. The secret of its authorship was keenly debated and jealously kept. The most ridiculous surmises as to its anonymous origin were everywhere afloat. Some attributed it to Thackeray, and some to Prince Albert, some to Lyell, some to Sir John Herschel, and some to Charles Darwin himself. Obscurantists thought it a wicked book; 'intellectual' people thought it an advanced book. As a matter of fact it was neither the one nor the other. It was just a pale and colourless transcript of the old familiar teleological Lamarckism. Yet it did good in its generation. The public at large were induced by its ephemeral vogue to interest themselves in a question to which they had never previously given even a passing thought, though more practised biologists of evolutionary tendencies were grieved at heart that evolution should first have been popularly presented to the English world under so unscientific, garbled, and mutilated a form. From the philosophic side, Herbert Spencer found 'this ascription of organic evolution to some aptitude naturally possessed by organisms or miraculously imposed upon them' to be 'one of those explanations which explain nothing – a shaping of ignorance into the semblance of knowledge. The cause assigned,' he says, 'is not a true cause – not a cause assimilable to known causes – not a cause that can be anywhere shown to produce analogous effects. It is a cause unrepresentable in thought: one of those illegitimate symbolic conceptions which cannot by any mental process be elaborated into a real conception.' From the scientific side, on the other hand, Darwin felt sadly the inaccuracy and want of profound technical knowledge everywhere displayed by the anonymous author. These things might naturally cause the enemy to blaspheme. No worse calamity, indeed, can happen to a great truth than for its defence to be intrusted to inefficient hands. Nevertheless, long after, in the 'Origin of Species,' the great naturalist wrote with generous appreciation of the 'Vestiges of Creation,' 'In my own opinion it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.'

Still Darwin gave no sign. A flaccid, cartilaginous, unphilosophic evolutionism had full possession of the field for the moment, and claimed, as it were, to be the genuine representative of the young and vigorous biological creed, while he himself was in truth the real heir to all the honours of the situation. He was in possession of the master-key which alone could unlock the bars that opposed the progress of evolution, and still he waited. He could afford to wait. He was diligently collecting, amassing, investigating; eagerly reading every new systematic work, every book of travels, every scientific journal, every record of sport, or exploration, or discovery, to extract from the dead mass of undigested fact whatever item of implicit value might swell the definite co-ordinated series of notes in his own commonplace books for the now distinctly contemplated 'Origin of Species.' His way was to make all sure behind him, to summon up all his facts in irresistible array, and never to set out upon a public progress until he was secure against all possible attacks of the ever-watchful and alert enemy in the rear. Few men would have had strength of mind enough to resist the temptation offered by the publication of the 'Vestiges of Creation,' and the extraordinary success attained by so flabby a presentation of the evolutionary case: Darwin resisted it, and he did wisely.

We may, however, take it for granted, I doubt not, that it was the appearance and success of Chambers's invertebrate book which induced Darwin, in 1844 (the year of its publication), to enlarge his short notes 'into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed to him probable.' This sketch he showed to Dr. (now Sir Joseph) Hooker, no doubt as a precaution to ensure his own claim of priority against any future possible competitor. And having thus eased his mind for the moment, he continued to observe, to read, to devour 'Transactions,' to collate instances, with indefatigable persistence for fifteen years longer. If any man mentally measures out fifteen years of his own life, and bethinks him of how long a space it seems when thus deliberately pictured, he will be able to realise a little more definitely – but only a little – how profound was the patience, the self-denial, the single-mindedness of Darwin's intense search after the ultimate truths of natural science.

What was the sketch that he thus committed to paper in 1844, and submitted to the judgment of his friend Hooker? It was the germ of the theory of natural selection. According to that theory, organic development is due to the survival of the fittest among innumerable variations, good, bad, and indifferent, from one or more parent stocks. Darwin's reading of Malthus had suggested to him (apparently as early as the date of publication of the 'Naturalist's Journal') the idea that every species of plant and animal must always be producing a far greater number of seeds, eggs, germs, or young offspring than could possibly be needed for the maintenance of the average number of the species. Of these young, by far the greater number must always perish from generation to generation, for want of space, of food, of air, of raw material. The survivors in each brood must be those naturally best adapted for survival. The many would be eaten, starved, overrun, or crowded out; the few that survive would be those that possessed any special means of defence against aggressors, any special advantage for escaping starvation, any special protection against overrunning or overcrowding foes. Animals and plants, Darwin found on inquiry and investigation, tended to vary under diverse circumstances from the parent or parents that originally produced them. These variations were usually infinitesimal in amount, but sometimes more considerable or even striking. If any particular variation tended in any way to preserve the life of the creatures that exhibited it, beyond the average of their like competitors, that variation would in the long run survive, and the individuals that possessed it, being thus favoured in the struggle for existence, would replace the less adapted form from which they sprang. Darwinism is Malthusianism on the large scale: it is the application of the calculus of population to the wide facts of universal life.