394 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



ology, accompanied an exploring expedition to Nova Zembla; 

 Dana sailed to the Pacific in 1838-1842 ; Huxley in the Rattle- 

 snake in 1846-1850; and Alfred Russel Wallace visited the 

 Malay Archipelago a little later. 



The result of these scientific explorations was to throw a flood 

 of new light upon the infinite wealth, variety, creative resources 

 and capacity of this earth and its inhabitants, plants as well as 

 animals, and to reveal adaptations of organisms to climate, soil, 

 and other environmental conditions countless in number and 

 marvellous in character, all of which raised again the ancient and 

 vexing questions : How did these adaptations arise ? And what 

 was the origin of species ? 



DARWIN'S ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859). For this, the most 

 influential scientific work of the nineteenth century, and one of 

 the most important ever written, the way had now been prepared 

 by the publications of Malthus, Treviranus, Lamarck, Lyell, and 

 Chambers. In particular, as Huxley pointed out, Lyell's work, 

 by showing that the earth is very old and has been long ages in the 

 making had, since 1830, shaken the confidence of men of science in 

 the old cosmogony and so paved the way for Darwin ; and when in 

 1854 remains of prehistoric man were found with those of extinct 

 animals, such as the cave bear and the cave lion, even popular 

 confidence in the Mosaic theory began to be undermined. 



Darwin's great work appeared in 1859 and aroused world-wide 

 criticism and controversy. In his autobiography Darwin acknowl- 

 edges his constant obligation to Lyell and also to Malthus, 

 whose emphasis on the struggle for food revealed to Darwin 

 the fuller meaning of what in the Origin he termed the struggle 

 for existence, a struggle in which by natural selection there 

 must be progressively a survival of the fittest. In the long 

 and fierce battle which now broke out between the defenders 

 of the old cosmogony and the new, and which at first went 

 no further than proposing to account for the origin of species of 

 living things by natural selection instead of by special creation, 

 Darwin was ably supported by his friends the naturalists, Hux- 

 ley, Hooker, and Lyell in England and Asa Gray in America. 



