DARWIN AND COPERNICUS. H9 



Should any one be skeptical as to the sufficiency of these laws to account for the 

 present state of things, science can furnish no evidence strong enough to over- 

 throw his doubts until the sun shall be found growing smaller by actual meas- 

 urement, or the nebulas be actually seen to condense into stars and systems. 



DARWIN AND COPERNICUS.* 



By Professor E. DU B01S-EEYM0ND. 



THE losses by death -which natural science has sustained during the 

 past year are unusually heavy. The fertile and ingenious mathe- 

 matician -who for more than a generation held a leading position among 

 French men of science as the publisher of one of the best-known 

 mathematical journals ; the chemist who, by the first organic synthe- 

 sis, helped to dispel the illusion of vital energy ; the physiologist who 

 solved one of the oldest problems of humanity are men whose death 

 leaves a void not easily filled up. But the luster of even such names 

 as Liouville, Wohler, and Bischoff pales before that of the first on our 

 list, Charles Darwin. Nearly every learned society in existence has 

 publicly deplored his loss. As this Academy has not hitherto found a 

 fitting opportunity for doing so, it is necessary to add a few words to 

 the formal mention of his decease, to show that we also appreciate the 

 greatness of the man and of the loss science has sustained in him. 



To say anything fresh concerning him will only be possible when 

 the lapse of time and the progress of science have opened up new 

 points of view ; and the speaker, who has often had occasion to dis- 

 cuss Darwin before this Academy, finds it especially difficult not to 

 repeat himself, the more so as opinions of his w^ork are still somewhat 

 apt to be influenced by personal feeling. 



Darwin seems to me to be the Copernicus of the organic world. 

 In the sixteenth century Copernicus put an end to the anthropocentric 

 theory by doing away with the Ptolemaic spheres and bringing our 

 earth down to the rank of an insignificant planet. At the same time 

 he proved the non-existence of the so-called empyrean, the supposed 

 abode of the heavenly hosts, beyond the seventh sphere, although Gi- 

 ordano Bruno was the first who actually drew the inference. 



Man, however, still stood apart from the rest of animated beings 

 not at the top of the scale, his proper place, but quite away, as a being 

 absolutely incommensurable with them. One hundred years later Des- 

 cartes still held that man alone had a soul, and that beasts were mere 

 automata. Notwithstanding all the labor of naturalists since the days 

 of Lmnseus, notwithstanding the resurrection of vanished genera and 

 species by Cuvier, the theory of the origin and interdependence of 



* Address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. 



