A NOTE 

 ON 'THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ' 



Charles Darwin, the author of this volume, was horn at 

 Shrewsbury in 1809 ; he died at Bromley, Kent, in 1832, 

 aged 73. His years of active work thus covered ap- 

 proximately the five midmost decades of the Nineteenth 

 Century, from 1830 to 1880. He was a naturalist of the 

 very highest rank, and the discoverer of the famous theory 

 of Natural Selection. The great treatise in which that 

 theory was promulgated, however, — f The Origin of 

 Species' — did not appear till 1859, when Darwin v>as 

 over fifty. It completely revolution? zed the sciences of 

 Botany and Zoology, and made the doctrine of Organic 

 Evolution, till then admitted only by a few advanced 

 philosophical biologists, the universal creed of men of 

 science. By that famous book, and by its equally 

 admirable companion volume l The Descent of Man,' 

 Darwin will always be most remembered. He was not 

 indeed the first to set forth the now accepted idea that all 

 species of plants or animals, including man, are derived by 

 descent, with various modifications, from a single original 

 ancestor ; but he was the first to give that idea general 

 currency and to secure its acceptance by means of his 

 luminous conception of Natural Selection. Organic Evolu- 

 tion triumphed through Darwin. 



GRANT ALLEN. 



