320 GREAT MEN OF SCIENCE 



experiments in the breeding of plants and animals, and new 

 ideas in these fields, thus standing in a nearer or more distant 

 connection with the work we have named, can only be men- 

 tioned here without detail. Thus Darwin's life, in spite of 

 poor health, was always filled with steady research, until he 

 died at the age of seventy-three. 



Like Newton, Watt, and Lord Kelvin, he was buried 

 in Westminster Abbey in London. A particularly fine 

 memorial to him is in the great hall of the Natural History 

 Museum in London, where a mighty marble statue shows 

 him seated amid the rich exhibits from the plant and animal 

 world, the wonderful and astonishingly manifold forms of 

 which he taught us to see in quite new connections, and 

 with much profounder ideas, and which now appear to us 

 as a large and closely connected family of blood relations, 

 right back from the furthest ancestors, up to the human 

 being who thus regards them. Darwin's work, after en- 

 countering at first very violent opposition, received the fullest 

 recognition, which Darwin himself lived to experience. But 

 there also followed great exaggeration, together with a new 

 wave of materialism, inasmuch as it was made to appear, in 

 a manner quite foreign to Darwin and his works, that nothing 

 remained hidden any longer from our understanding.^ 



This may have been aided by the fact, that in Darwin's 

 time the invariable validity of the energy principle, both for 

 living and for lifeless matter, was practically assured, so 



1 Many may have been led astray respecting Darwin's nature by the 

 fact that it was his lot at the close of his work on the origin of species, to 

 find himself opposed by a generally held view of the complete invaria- 

 bility of species, and of their production by some such piocess of creation 

 as is described in the Old Testament. Darwin was regarded by many as 

 a destroyer of spiritual values, and his views w£re welcomed, and carried 

 further, in this sense by some. Such complete misunderstanding of his 

 work, as contrasted with the search after truth to which his whole life and 

 all his writings bear witness, is again only a part of the thousand-year-old 

 curse, which the Old I'estament, regarded as a source of cultural fact 

 and moral elevation, has brought over that part of humanity which seeks 

 the light. 



