SOME EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS. 333 



Fiske supposed it to be a great novelty, and even conceived that he 

 himself was the original discoverer of it. In the preface to his 

 'Destiny of Man' Mr. Fiske writes: "The detection of the part played 

 by the lengthening of infancy in the genesis of the human race is my 

 own especial contribution to the doctrine of evolution, so that I feel 

 somewhat uncertain as to how far that subject will be understood." 

 But the thing had been detected, not merely by Herder, but also by 

 Pope, some fifty years before him ; and that Mr. Fiske should have 

 forgotten the fact only shows how general are the misapprehensions 

 which concern the history of biological conceptions. Pope wrote, in 

 the Third Epistle of the 'Essay on Man' (1733) : 



Thus beast and bird their common charge attend, 

 The mothers nurse it, and the sires defend; 

 The young dismissed, to wander earth or air, 

 There stops the Instinct, and there ends the care. 

 A longer care man's helpless kind demands, 

 That longer care contracts more lasting bands . . . 

 Still as one brood, and as another rose, 

 These nat'ral love maintained, habitual those: 

 The last, scarce ripened into perfect man, 

 Saw helpless him from whom their life began; 

 While pleasure, gratitude and hope combined 

 Still spread the interest, and preserved the kind. 



Pope got the suggestion of this from one of Bolingbroke 's 'Frag- 

 ments'; but Bolingbroke had missed the main point, which Pope, in 

 this case more original than his guide, clearly perceived. " If men," 

 Bolingbroke had written, "come helpless into the world like other 

 animals; if they require even longer than other animals to be nursed 

 and educated by the tender instinct of their parents; it is because they 

 have more to learn and more to do ; it is because they are prepared for 

 a more improved state and for greater happiness." 



Bolingbroke failed to see that the most important consequence of 

 the greater length of human infancy lay in its effect, not upon the 

 child, but upon the parent — in creating the necessity for a steady and 

 self-sacrificing affection and for a habitual subordination of immediate 

 and personal aims to remote and disinterested ones. It may be, then, 

 that to Pope should be given the credit of having first called attention 

 to the relation between the lengthening of infancy and the evolution 

 of social morality. It can hardly be doubted that it was the passage 

 in Pope's poem that suggested the idea to Herder. 



6. In all these cases the receptive and pregnant mind of Herder 

 had grasped and elaborated separate ideas which have since become 

 familiar parts of the general body of evolutionary theory. But did 

 he accept the essential doctrine of evolution itself? Did he believe in 

 the mutability of species and in the literal descent of man from lower 



