238 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



SOME EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS. 



By Professor ARTHUR LOVEJOY. 



WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY. 



A SATISFACTORY history of the theory of descent is a chapter 

 -*--*- in the records of human opinion that is still to be written. 

 Meanwhile the subject is one about which persistent errors and illusions 

 of historical perspective prevail. The popular mind appears to be 

 firmly possessed by the belief that the doctrine of the evolution of 

 species was a scientific innovation first promulgated, or at all events 

 first cogently defended, by Darwin; the fame of the natural-selection 

 hypothesis has become so great that its author figures, in the eyes of 

 the great public, as the parent of the whole transformist system, while 

 the earlier half century of controversy in behalf of that doctrine, 

 under the leadership of Lamarck and of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, is for- 

 gotten. How far even instructed persons may suffer from this illusion 

 of perspective was illustrated in the recent commemorations of the 

 Emerson centenary. More than one of the eulogists of the great 

 moralist of New England descanted upon his very un-Darwinian lines 

 which tell how — 



striving to be man, the worm 

 Mounts through all the spires of form, 



as a remarkable 'anticipation of Darwin' and an example of the power 

 of the poetic imagination to divine scientific truth. But the lines in 

 question, added to the editions of Emerson's 'Nature' after 1849, are, 

 of course, merely an epigrammatic versification of the main doctrine 

 of Robert Chambers's 'Vestiges of Creation,' published in 1844; and 

 the conception they express could hardly have been a very original one 

 at any time after the appearance of Lamarck 's ' Philosophic Zoologique ' 

 in 1809. The same confusion is illustrated again in the persistency 

 with which writers on Tennyson take it for granted that the famous 



passage in ' In Memoriam ' about nature, 



so careful of the type, 

 So careless of the single life, 



is an echo of the 'Origin of Species,' which in reality did not appear 

 until at least fifteen years after this part of the poem was written. 

 Even Mr. Frederic Harrison has — as Mr. Lang has pointed out — fallen 

 into this error; and Mr. G. K. Chesterton has recently written about 

 Tennyson in a way calculated to give the error fresh currency. But 



