THE DOCTRINE OF DARWIN.* 



By Theodore Gill. 



The chief for many years of the leaders in science knows no 

 longer the world he erstwhile knew so well. Charles Darwin has 

 closed a life illustrious in the annals of biology, scarce full of years 

 but very full of honors. 



How fruitful was that life and how potent its influence on philoso- 

 phy and on sociology the united voice of the civilized world pro- 

 claims — how grievous the loss the lamentations of mankind testify. 

 Less than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the publication 

 of the " Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection." How 

 great is the contrast between the beliefs and practice of naturalists 

 before its appearance and those of their present successors ! He 

 would, indeed, have been a bold man who would have predicted 

 that, in two decades after its appearance, the views therein promul- 

 gated would be universally accepted and be taken as the recognized 

 platform of biologists. But the incredible has actually happened ; 

 all the students of nature, and in every land ; zoologists and bot- 

 anists, palaeontologists and geologists — in America and Europe, 

 at the confines of Asia, the extreme of Africa, and in distant Aus- 

 tralia — all meet on common ground as evolutionists ; all recognize 

 to a greater or less extent the operation of natural selection in the 

 survival of the fittest. To appreciate the cause of the profound 

 impression produced by the deceased naturalist's greatest work, 

 some reference to the antecedent and succeeding conditions is fit- 

 ting. 



It had been, from time immemorial, a generally accepted idea 

 that the living beings which people the globe had, in some mys- 



* Several of the paragraphs in this address were published in advance, with a 

 few modifications, in " The Critic," of New York, for May 6, 1882. 



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