344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF CHAELES DAEWIN 



By CHARLES P. COX 



PRESIDENT OF THE KEW YOKK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



WE are assembled, at the invitation of an organization devoted to 

 the dissemination of scientific knowledge, under the hospitable 

 roof of an institution maintained for the promotion of systematic 

 observation, for the purpose of honoring the memory of one of the 

 greatest of seers. Charles Darwin, whose birthday we celebrate, was 

 a man of the clearest mental vision born into a generation scientific- 

 ally blind. He first, of those in his day accounted wise, was able to 

 see all nature unfolding according to uniform and verifiable law. The 

 outlook of other men called by his contemporaries scientists and philoso- 

 phers was, as a rule, limited and obscured by a narrowing and hamper- 

 ing doctrine of supernatural intervention. It is hard for us, who are 

 privileged to contemplate with admiring minds the harmonious inter- 

 relations of all natural phenomena, to realize that only fifty years ago 

 it was commonly regarded as both irrational and immoral to believe 

 that one great principle underlay the origin, maintenance, diversifica- 

 tion and development of living forms and that tliat principle was dis- 

 coverable through human investigation. During the ages previous to 

 the memorable year 1859 a few bold thinkers, now and then, had ven- 

 tured to suggest a theory of general evolution, but they had failed to 

 supply it with a substantial foundation of proof, or to assign to it a 

 reasonable and intelligible cause, and had been, consequently, one and 

 all, overwhelmed and suppressed by the powerful and prevalent dogma 

 of special creation. Naturalists had been for centuries active in the 

 collection of facts, but, until Darwin came, the various phenomena of 

 living things remained disconnected and unexplained. Indeed, it was 

 impossible that they should have been correlated and elucidated as long 

 as the domain of science was in thralldom to tyrannical authority and 

 originality of thought was little less than a crime. For a hundred years 

 prior to Darwin even professed students of nature were not free to see 

 what lay under their very eyes. The scientific world was awaiting a 

 liberator. Finally the revolution was proclaimed and the first decisive 

 blow struck by the publication of "The Origin of Species" on the 

 twenty-fourth of November, 1859. It was no hasty and ill-considered 



^ An address given at the American Museum of Natural History on Feb- 

 ruary 12, on the occasion of tlie presentation of a bust of Darwin by the New 

 York Academy of Sciences to the museum. 



