LECTURE X 



NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY 



DARWIN'S book on the " Origin of Species " did not make its 

 way, even among men of science, without searching examination; 

 and it is interesting to note that, in the early days of its history, 

 all of its most prominent advocates were English in their intellec- 

 tual training, although some, like Asa Gray, were not English by 

 birth. Lyell, Wallace, Darwin, Gray, and Huxley knew Lamarck's 

 writings well, and, in this day of Neo-Lamarckism, we may find 

 profit in studying the influences that led all these vigorous and 

 independent thinkers to condemn his speculations as worse than 

 worthless, while they welcomed natural selection as one of the 

 greatest triumphs of the human mind. 



The story of the reception of the " Origin," as it is told in 

 Darwin's letters, shows how it won its way in spite of prejudice. 

 Belief that the problem is one that man may hope to solve was rap- 

 idly growing among the thoughtful ; for a long series of brilliant 

 discoveries in embryology, in anatomy, in paleontology, in geograph- 

 ical biology, and in many other fields, had shown that zoology is 

 orderly, and exhibits laws, like other sciences; but the remains 

 of so many failures lay beside the path of history that most cau- 

 tious students, in England at least, were in a hostile rather than a 

 sympathetic frame of mind, and were indisposed to welcome a 

 new attempt to bring all these classes of phenomena into a single 

 point of view. 



To men like Huxley, who had refused to have anything to 

 say to a necessary principle of universal progress, and had grown 

 weary of speculation, Darwin's book commended itself as strictly 

 scientific ; for it is based upon the hard work of half a lifetime, 

 and, making no attempt to account for the fundamental properties 

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