5 o2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



making knowledge impossible it glorifies ignorance. What is 

 left for the student of Nature save to record facts as lie finds 

 them when every question as to how things have come to be 

 as they are receive but the one reply, ' The Creator designed 

 them so ' ? " 



It is not my intention or wish to defend in itself the doc- 

 trine of design, nor is this the place to review the reviewer 

 or criticise the above-quoted criticism ; but such uncalled-for 

 prejudice and illogical reasoning as shown therein do cause the 

 question to arise, What, after all, is the real motive for scientific 

 research ? 



A little over fifty years ago a young Englishman was busily 

 engaged in gathering and arranging all kinds of facts in regard 

 to changes in animals and plants, either under domestication or in 

 a state of Nature. For twenty years or more he worked patiently 

 and carefully gathering his facts, comparing and arranging them 

 and mentally digesting all this mass of material, and, at last, in 

 1859, he offered to the world his theory of the Origin of Species. 

 Before Charles Darwin, all naturalists were' engaged in gathering 

 and recording facts, and arranging them in a more or less natural 

 order, but they failed to compare and digest them, as he did, be- 

 cause they were content with statistics and did not ask for reasons. 

 That this was due to a belief in the immutability of species and 

 the doctrine of design there can be little doubt ; but that the great 

 men who accepted that doctrine did so because it " saved intellec- 

 tual toil " or " glorified ignorance " is a gross slander. They did 

 so partly because of early training, but very largely because it was 

 a satisfactory explanation of such problems as they happened to 

 meet and so proved its sufficiency. When Darwin, however, 

 came to apply it to the facts as he found them in his day, he soon 

 proved it was not sufficient, and then was asked for the first time 

 in biology, Hoiv did these things come to be so ? The question 

 had been asked long before in physics, chemistry, and astronomy ; 

 but until the middle of this century biologists and even geologists 

 had been chiefly concerned with the question What ? and had 

 neglected the far more important one How ? It was the asking 

 of this question, and the answer to it which he gave, which makes 

 Darwin the bright particular star in the scientific firmament of 

 the nineteenth century, and no lapse of time can ever dim the lus- 

 ter of that honored name. However inadequate we may consider 

 the theory of natural selection to account for all the innumerable 

 forms of animal and plant life which have existed or do now in- 

 habit and beautify the earth, there can be no doubt that the ques- 

 tion as an answer to which it was offered has been for thirty-five 

 years the mainspring of research not merely in biology but in all 

 the field of natural science. It is easy to see how this condition 



