5 o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



phenomena of plant and animal life. But Charles Darwin had then 

 just returned from the cruise of the Beagle, and was revolving slowly 

 in his own mind the observations and ideas which blossomed out at 

 last into the " Origin of Species." The germs of evolutionism were 

 already in the air. Lamarck's crude speculations had aroused the at- 

 tention of all the best biological intellects of the era. Before long 

 Chambers published the " Vestiges of Creation," and Herbert Spencer 

 was hard at work upon the groundwork of the " System of Synthetic 

 Philosophy." The paleontological work of Agassiz, Barraude, Owen, 

 and others, and the general advance in knowledge of comparative 

 anatomy and embryology, paved the way for the triumph of the new 

 ideas ; while simultaneously the dry bones of botany were being 

 kindled into life by a younger school of workers in many French and 

 German gardens and laboratories. With the appearance of the " Ori- 

 gin of Species" in 1859, the new departure definitely began. In 

 twenty years the whole world was converted en bloc. Evolution on 

 the organic side has been chiefly expounded in England by Darwin, 

 Huxley, Spencer, and Wallace ; and on the whole, though of world- 

 wide acceptance, it has been a peculiarly English movement. Hith- 

 erto, indeed, we Britons have been remarkable as the propounders of 

 the deepest and wisest scientific generalizations : it is only of late 

 years that our bookish educators of the new school have conceived 

 the noble ambition of turning us all into imitation Germans. 



Life thus falls into its proper place in the scheme of things as due 

 essentially to the secondary action of radiated solar energy, intercepted 

 on the moist outer crust of a cooling and evolving planet. Its various 

 forms have been gradually produced, mainly by the action of natural 

 selection or survival of the fittest on the immense number of separate 

 individuals ejected from time to time by pre-existing organisms. How 

 the first organisms came to exist at all we can as yet only conjecture ; 

 to feeble and unimaginative minds the difficulty of such a conjecture 

 seems grotesquely exaggerated ; but granting the existence of a prime 

 organism or group of organisms plus the fact of reproduction with 

 heredity and variations, and the tendency of such reproduction to be- 

 get increase in a geometrical ratio, we can deduce from these simple ele- 

 mentary factors the necessary corollary of survival of the fittest, with 

 all its far-reaching and marvelous implications. Our age has discov- 

 ered for the first time the cumulative value of the infinitesimal. " Many 

 a little makes a mickle " ; that was Lyell's key in geology, that was 

 Darwin's key in the science of life. Herbert Spencer's "Principles of 

 Biology " most fully sum up this whole aspect of evolution as applied 

 to the genesis of organic beings. 



In 1837, the science of man, and the sciences that gather round 

 the personality of man, had scarcely yet begun to be dreamed of. 

 But evolutionism and geological investigation have revolutionized our 

 conception of our own species and of the place which it holds in the 



