SPENCER AND DARWIN. 815 



SPENCER AND DARWIN. 



By GEANT ALLEN. 



IT is a familiar observation witli people wlio have reached mid- 

 dle age that their chronological conception of their own time 

 is often far more defective than their chronological conception of 

 written history in which they have not themselves participated. 

 Men of our own generation may remember exactly the relative 

 dates of Pharsalia and Philippi ; they may be clearly aware of 

 just how Raphael stood in time to Perugino or to Titian ; they 

 may know precisely how long Napoleon, Byron, and Talleyrand 

 survived the Restoration. But about the events of their own life- 

 time they are always asking themselves, " In what year did Lord 

 Beaconsfield die ? " " How long did the Prince Imperial go on 

 living after Sedan ? " " Was Carlyle still among us when Mr. 

 Gladstone was denouncing the Bulgarian atrocities ? " and so 

 forth perpetually. Even the sequence of events in one^s own life 

 often similarly deceives one. We forget whether Tom went to 

 Australia before or after Lucy's marriage ; whether we had or 

 had not made McFarlane's acquaintance at the time when King- 

 ston was engaged in painting his first Academy picture. We 

 remember events, but not their order. Daily facts of life, crowd- 

 ing in upon us too thickly for due note, defy all accurate chrono- 

 logical organization. We recall them disconnectedly ; the occur- 

 rences impress themselves more or less upon our brains, but their 

 infinite concatenation with all other circumstances escapes us. 

 Hence we are often more surprised at learning a little later how 

 events really stood to one another in our own time than at any- 

 thing which comes to us from unremembered periods. 



Especially is this the case with slow organic or psychological 

 movements movements which grow unseen, and gain but grad- 

 ual recognition. Cataclysmal events the D^chdance of the Sec- 

 ond Empire, the Italians in Rome, the assassination of the Czar 

 often fix themselves by their very vividness and unexpectedness 

 on the memory, with their date and relations ineffaceably at- 

 tached. But where we have to deal with the growth of opinion, 

 most peojDle fall into serious mental errors of chronology. Either 

 they believe a movement began when they themselves first hap- 

 pened to hear of it ; or else they date it from the appearance of 

 some startling and much- discussed publication. 



Mr. Edward Clodd's new volume. Pioneers of Evolution, brings 

 this truth into strong relief. In this interesting and careful work 

 Mr. Clodd has been at the pains to investigate thoroughly the 

 part borne in the evolutionary revolution, both by the early pre- 

 cursors Buffon, Lamarck, Laplace, and others and by the three 



