80 CHARLES DARWIN. 



bring about a state of affairs in which the earnest attention of all 

 scientific thinkers was directed to the probability of change being 

 the result of law rather than of spasmodic miraculous interpo- 

 sition. He made the scientists of his time begin to see that, as 

 Emerson says : — 



" The world was built in order, 

 And the atoms march in tune." 



It was his Philosophie Zoologique that touched to its very 

 centre the course of evolutionary research all over the science 

 world, and not even the genius of the immortal Cuvier himself 

 brought to bear against the doctrine could stifle it in its slow but 

 certain growth. 



Geology and Astronomy were not less moved than was Biology 

 by the on-coming wave. Murchison, Sedgwick, Buckland, Lyell, 

 Phillips, De la Beche, Agassiz, Kant, Laplace, and Herschell were 

 all, consciously or unconsciously, contributing to the massive 

 phalanx of discovered facts that went to support the modification 

 hypothesis, some of which facts could be explained by this 

 hypothesis only, and which, dim and unsuggestive without it, were 

 bright and significant in its brilliant light. 



Into such a world of science and philosophy Charles Darwin 

 was born in 1809. What wonder, that coming from the families I 

 have named into an, atmosphere where men of the profoundest 

 powers of research and thought were busy looking into this newly 

 discovered evolutionary realm, he, endowed with a Divinely-given 

 genius, should have set himself to find out the ^ why ' and the 

 ' how ' of the doctrine which had already found wide acceptance ? 

 All around him he saw men who were building up the theory of 

 slow modification from previous types into a grand and glorious 

 certainty \ it was for him to make known the one thing needful to 

 its final adoption — the means by which this age-long process had 

 been and was being accomplished. Let me quote in full, for the 

 sake of its own beauty and completeness. Grant Allen's picture in 

 words of the scientific world when Darwin came into it, before we 

 try to see the work he performed : — " On every side evolutionism 

 in its crude form was already in the air. Long before Darwin 

 himself published his conclusive ' Origin of Species,' every 

 thinking mind in the world of science^ elder and younger, was 



