comprehensive enough to afford a secure and scientific basis for the theory of descent. Lamarck alone had attempted to indicate the forces from which, in his opinion, the transmutation of species could have resulted.

It was not, however, solely because the basis of fact was insufficient that the theory of the evolution of organic nature did not gain ground at that time; it was even more because such foundation as there was for it was not adhered to. All sorts of vague speculations were indulged in, and these contributed less and less to the support of the theory the more far-reaching they became. Many champions of the "Naturphilosophie" of the time, especially Oken and Schelling, promulgated mere hypotheses as truths; forsaking the realm of fact almost entirely, they attempted to construct the whole world with a free hand, so to speak, and lost themselves more and more in worthless phantasy.

This naturally brought the theory of evolution, and with it "Naturphilosophie," into disrepute, especially with the true naturalists, those who patiently observe and collect new facts. The theory lost all credence, and sank so low in the general estimation that it came to be regarded as hardly fitting for a naturalist to occupy himself with philosophical conceptions.

This was the state of matters onwards from 1830, the year in which the final battle between the theory of evolution and the old theory of creation was fought out by Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier in the Paris Academy. Cuvier triumphed, and thus it came about that an idea so important as that of evolution sank into oblivion again after its emergence, and was expunged from the pages of science so completely that it seemed as if it were for ever buried beyond hope of resurrection.

Scientific men now turned with

eagerness towards special problems in all the domains of life, and the following period may well be characterized as that of purely detailed investigation.

Great progress was made during this period; entirely new branches of science were founded, and a wealth of unexpected facts was discovered. The development of individual organisms, of which little had previously been known, began to be revealed in all its marvellous diversity: first, the development of the chick in the egg; then of the frog; then of insects and worms; then of spiders, crustaceans, starfishes, and all the classes and orders of molluscs, as well as of backboned animals from the lowest fish up to man himself. Within this period of purely detailed investigation there falls also the discovery, in animals and plants, of that smallest microscopically visible building-stone of the living body, the cell, and this discovery paved the way for the full development of the newlyfound science of tissues, histology.

In botany the chief progress in this period was in regard to the reproduction and development of the lower plants, or cryptogams, and the discovery of alternation of generations, a mode of reproduction that had previously been known in several groups of the animal kingdom, in polyps and medusæ, in various worms, and later in insects and crustaceans.

At the same time it was found that the proposition, which had hitherto been accepted as a matter of course, that an egg can only develop after it has been fertilized, is not universally valid, for there is a development without previous fertilization-parthenogenesis, or virgin birth.

Thus, in the period between the Napoleonic wars and 1859, an ever-increasing mass of new facts was accumulated, and among these there were so many of an unexpected nature

that further effort was constantly being put forth to elucidate detailed processes in every domain. This was desirable and important, was, indeed, indispensable to a deeper knowledge of organic nature. But, in the endeavor to investigate details, naturalists forgot to inquire into the deeper causes and correlations, which might have enabled them to build up out of the wealth of details a more general conception of life. So great was the reaction from the unfortunate speculations of the so-called "Naturphilosophie," that there was a tendency to shrink even from taking a comprehensive survey of isolated facts, which might lead to the induction of general principles.

How deep was the oblivion into which the philosophical conceptions of the beginning of the century had sunk by the middle of it may be gathered from the fact that, in my own student days in the fifties I never heard a theory of descent referred to, and I found no mention of it in any book to which I had access. One of the most famous of my teachers, the gifted anatomist, J. Henle, had written as a motto under his picture, "There is a virtue of renunciation, not in the domain of morality alone, but in that of intellect as well.” This sentence was entirely obscure to me as a student, because I knew nothing of the intellectual excesses of the "Naturphilosophie," and I only understood later, after the revival of interest in general problems, that this insistence upon the virtue of intellectual renunciation was intended as a counteractive to the over-speculations of that period.

This was one-sided, but it was a necessary reaction from the one-sidedness in the opposite direction which had preceded it.

The next swing of the pendulum was brought about by Charles Darwin in 1859 with his book on "The Origin of Species."

Let us now consider the development of this remarkable man, and note the steps by which he attained to his lifework. Charles Darwin was born on the 12th of February, 1809, the same year in which Lamarck published his "Philosophie Zoologique." But he had not sucked in the doctrines of that evolutionist, or of his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, with his mother's milk. His youth fell within the period of the reaction from philosophical speculation, and he grew up wholly in the old ideas of the creation of species and their immutability. His birthplace was the little town of Shrewsbury, near the borders of Wales, where his father was a highly respected physician, well-to-do even according to English standards.

If we think of Darwin's later achievements we are apt to suppose that the bent towards natural science must have been apparent in him at a very early age, but this was not the case, at least not to a degree sufficient to attract the attention of those about him. It is easy now, of course, to say that the pronounced liking for ranging about wood and field, and collecting, quite unscientifically, plants, beetles and minerals, foreshadowed the future naturalist. Even as a boy Darwin was an enthusiastic sportsman and an excellent shot, and the first snipe he brought down excited him so much that he was hardly able to reload.1 But he must have been not merely a sportsman but an eager observer, especially of birds, for at that time he wondered “in his simplicity" that every gentleman was not an ornithologist, so much

was he attracted by what

1 I can say the same of myself, for although in my boyhood I did not shoot birds, I had a passion for butterfly-hunting. When I saw the rare limenitis populi resting on the ground in front of me for the first time, I became so excited that I could not at first throw my net, and when I did throw it, though my aim was usually very accurate, I struck the butterfly obliquely over the wing with the iron ring of the net. The traces of this awkward aim are visible on the wing to this day.

he observed of the habits of birds. The school which he began to attend at Shrewsbury in his ninth year was probably very similar to our earlier gymnasia. Darwin himself maintained that nothing could have been worse for bis intellectual development than this purely classical school, in which nothing was taught, in addition to the ancient languages, except a little ancient history and geography.

Darwin had no talent for languages, and no pleasure in them. So he remained a very mediocre scholar, and his father therefore removed him from school in his sixteenth year, and sent him to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine.

The condition of the English universities at that time must have left much to be desired, for Darwin characterizes the majority of the lectures as terribly dull, and the time spent in attending them as lost. Moreover, anatomy disgusted him, and the tedium of the geological lectures repelled him so that he vowed never again to open a book on geology, a resolution which, happily, he did not adhere to.

In his student days, as in his schooltime, he roamed about in the open air, sometimes shooting, sometimes riding, sometimes making long expeditions afoot. But even then he was not a conscious observer of Nature, not a naturalist, but rather a lover of the beauty of Nature and a collector of all sorts of natural objects, though he collected still, as he had done at school, rather from the collecting impulse frequently characteristic of youth than from any real scientific interest. If he had had that interest his chief passion would not have been the shooting of birds. His friends even found him one day making a knot in a string attached to his button-hole for every bird he succeeded in bringing down! Thus he must have been mainly a sportsman, a hunting fanatic whose chief desire was

to bring down as many birds as possible in a day. However, this devotion to sport must have stood him in good stead later, especially on his great journey, for through it he not only acquired the technique of shooting, but he sharpened his naturally acute powers of observation.

He remained two years in Edinburgh, and then entered the University of Cambridge. His father, who had observed his disinclination for medicine, proposed that he should study theology, and Darwin knew himself so little that he was quite willing to agree to the proposal. He examined himself very conscientiously to see whether he was able to subscribe to the dogmas of the Anglican Church, and he came to the conclusion that he could accept as truth every word that the Bible contained. This was certainly remarkable, and proves that the "Zoonomia" of his grandfather, Erasmus, and the doctrines of Lamarck, as far as he was acquainted with them, had not taken very deep root.

So he proceeded to study theology. But he did it much in the same way as he had studied medicine in Edinburgh; he listened only to what pleased him, and that cannot have been very much, for here, too, he complained of the dullness of official lectures. Nevertheless, at the end of three years he passed his examination quite creditably and received the degree of B.A.

Of the greatest advantage to him in Cambridge was his intercourse with two distinguished teachers of the University, and this intercourse probably guided him imperceptibly towards the real work of his life. One of these teachers was Professor Henslow, a theologian who, afterwards accepted a living, but who had a comprehensive knowledge not only of entomology, but of chemistry, botany, mineralogy, and geology. By Henslow Darwin was introduced to the professor of geology,

Sedgwick, and he, too, interested himself greatly in the young man, taking him with him on his longer geological excursions, and thus giving him a most valuable introduction to the science. This proved of the greatest use to Darwin on his travels, and probably enabled him to make his numerous geological observations.

He

Other older men also admitted Darwin to their friendship, so that it is obvious that there must have been something about him even then which distinguished him from others of his age. His interests now began to widen; he came under the educative influence of art, and studied the picture gallery in Cambridge, and later the National Gallery in London. gained the entrance to a musical circle, and derived great pleasure from music, though, curiously enough, as he tells us, he was almost destitute of "ear," and could not even whistle "God Save the King" correctly. He was thus one of those rare persons who are exceedingly sensitive to the emotional effect of music and yet possess little or nothing of its physical basis, the sense of tone.

In addition to all this, Darwin retained his passion for beetles, and collected with such ardor that twenty years later he recognized at sight small rare species he had found under bark or moss at that time. His powers of observation had thus been awakened, although as yet they were employed mainly to minister to his zeal for collecting. But collecting is not a mere amusement for the young naturalist; it is a necessary discipline in surveying a definite range of forms, and it cannot well be replaced by anything else. One who has never collected, and thus never made himself thoroughly acquainted with a limited circle of forms, will find it difficult to fill up the gap in his attainments in later life.

In vacation time towards the autumn

of each year Darwin turned again with enthusiasm to sport, either at his home in Shrewsbury or on his uncle Wedgewood's large estate of Maer. He did not lose a possible day from this amusement, for as he says in his autobiography, "I should have thought myself mad to give up the first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other science." Thus, notwithstanding his interest in geology and beetle-collecting, in pictures and music, the old passion for the chase was still the dominant one; one pleasure crowded upon another, and the whole made his life a joyous symphony, so that he could say of that period, "The three years which I spent at Cambridge were the most joyful in my happy life." But in the midst of all the joyousness of life he was undergoing an inward preparation for the seriousness of it. We can gather from his own account of that time that the strongest impulse towards the study of natural science came from reading two works which aroused his interest, Humboldt's "Personal Narrative" and Herschel's "Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy." Darwin says of these: "No other book influenced me so much as these two." He used to copy long passages from Humboldt about Teneriffe and read them aloud to Henslow. He was very anxious to go to Teneriffe, and even made inquiries in London about a ship to take him there, when an event happened which overthrew that project, but at the same time opened up the way to a naturalist's career the only one really suited to him-in a much more satisfactory manHe received a proposal to make a voyage round the world.

ner.

It must appear to us singular that a young man who had just finished his University course, and had done no scientific work of any kind, should be invited to accompany as naturalist a naval vessel which was being sent