ZOOLOGY 449 



innumerable foes, finds itself involved in a warfare that is tragically 

 one-sided ; and it must prevail over all its many foes or it must acknowl- 

 edge defeat and pay the penalty for unconditional surrender, which is 

 death — so stern and unyielding is that vast totality we individualize 

 as the environment. The generalized biological formula, then, for 

 the turmoil of nature is adaptation = life. 



Here, then, is the heart of the mystery. How has this universal 

 condition of adaptation been brought about? What have animals 

 within them that might determine their greater or less efficiency? 

 What external influences, if any, are capable of directing the efforts 

 of living creatures to meet their enemies ? How are modifications per- 

 petuated when they have arisen? To many of these questions Darwin, 

 Weismann, Mendel, De Vries and others have found answers, not com- 

 plete or perfect, it is true, but they have relegated to the past the 

 former reply that supernatural causes must be invoked to account for 

 nature. Science is convinced that the study of nature's workings at 

 the present time reveals natural factors which are competent to account 

 for much of the wonderful process of evolution. 



As every one knows, the works of Darwin inaugurated our recent era 

 in biology. In 1858, Darwin and Wallace announced the doctrine of 

 natural selection, and, in 1859, Darwin published the " Origin of 

 Species," a book that has proved a veritable Magna Charta of intel- 

 lectual liberties, for as no other single document before or since it 

 has released the thoughts of men from the trammels of unreasoned 

 conservatism and dogmatism. And its influence has been felt far 

 beyond the borders of biological science — it has extended to the very 

 confines of organized knowledge everywhere. But it is a mistaken 

 popular notion, and one of the hardest to drive from the mind of the 

 layman in science, that Darwin founded the doctrine of evolution by 

 the book mentioned and those that followed. The fact of evolutionary 

 descent had been established long before, while even some of the special 

 points of Darwin's theories as to method had been anticipated. Had 

 Darwin never lived, I believe that evolution would still be accepted 

 and taught at the present day. But Darwin rendered two immortal 

 services to science. During the twenty years that elapsed between the 

 first conception of his theories and the date of their publication, he 

 marshalled in orderly array all the biological data obtainable which 

 proved the transformation of species, including the previously unrec- 

 ognized body of evidence afforded by the domesticated animals. In 

 the second place, in his doctrine of natural selection he presented for 

 the first time a partial consistent program of nature's method of 

 accomplishing evolution. Darwin did not believe that this explanation 

 was final or even complete, whatever his opponents of the time or 

 critics of the present might contend. 



VOL. LXSUI. — 29. 



