LIFE AND WORKS OF DARWIN 319 



weapons of ostracism and loss of position. In Ijiology Linnaeus, 

 Bnffon^ Lamarck, St. Hilaire, in turn discovered the evidences of evo- 

 lution, but felt the penalty and either recanted or suffered loss of 

 position. The cause of supernaturalism had ne\er seemed stronger 

 than in 1857; the masterly works of Paley and Whewell had appeared; 

 the great series of Bridgewater Treatises to demonstrate the wisdom 

 and goodness of God in the special creation of adaptations had just 

 been closed ; men of rare abilitj'^, Cuvicr, Owen, Lyell and Agassiz, 

 were on the side of special creation; yet at the very time this whole 

 system of natural philosopliy was rotteii at the foundation because not 

 the work of free observation. 



Where his great predecessors Buff on and Lamarck had failed, 

 Darwin won through his unparalleled genius as an observer and 

 reasoner, through the absolutely irresistible force of the facts he had 

 assembled and through the simplicity of his presentation. Lacking 

 the literary graces of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and the 

 obscurity of Spencer, Darwin was understood by every one as every 

 one could understand Lincoln. It is true the cause was immediately 

 championed by able men, but victory was gained not by the vehement 

 and radical Haeckel nor yet by the masterly fighter Huxley, but 

 through the resistless power of the truth as Darwin saw it and pre- 

 sented it. It was not a denial, as had been the great skeptical move- 

 ment of the end of the eighteenth century, but an affirmation. Dar- 

 win was not destroying but building; yet at the time good and honest 

 men trembled as if passing through an earthquake, for in the whole 

 history of human thought there had been no such cataclysm. 



II 



In what he achieved Darwin is so entirely alone that his place in 

 the history of ideas is next to Aristotle, the great Greek biologist and 

 philosopher who preceded him by over 2,000 years. 



The biographers of Lincoln are at a loss to explain his greatness 

 through heredity. Darwin belonged to an able family, and his ances- 

 tors are singularly prophetic of his career. He was near of kin to 

 Francis Galton, who shares witli ^Veismann the leadership in the 

 study of heredity during the nineteenth century. By a happy com- 

 bination of all the best traits of the best of his ancestors coupled with 

 the no less happy omission of other traits, Darwin was a far greater 

 man than any of his forebears. Kindliness, truthfulness and love of 

 nature were part of his birthright. From his grandfather Erasmus, 

 Charles may have inherited especially his vividness of imagination and 

 his strong tendency to generalize. Countless hypotheses flitted through 

 his mind.^ " Without speculation there is no good and original ob- 



' " I can not resist forming one on every subject." 



