638 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



evolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked 

 for at Miidie's, and permitted to lie on tbe drawing-room table side 

 by side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous 

 court memoirs. Therefore society ignored them, and knew them not ; 

 the word evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and 

 refined dinner-table vocabulary. It recognized only the "Darwinian 

 theory," " natural selection," *' the missing link," and the belief that 

 men were merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sit- 

 ting upon them. To the world at large, that learned Mr. Darwin had 

 invented and patented the entire business, including descent with modi- 

 fication, if such notions ever occurred at all to the Avorld-at-large's 

 speculative intelligence. 



Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and older 

 antecedents than this easy, superficial, drawing-room view would lead 

 us to imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory, indeed, 

 and it has an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going 

 to push it back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the 

 vague and indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great 

 original Roman poet — the only original poet in the Latin language — 

 did indeed hit out for himself a very good rough working sketch of a 

 sort of nebulous and shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was con- 

 sistent, for its time it was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like 

 all the philosophies of the older world, was a mere speculative idea, 

 a fancy picture of the development of things, not dependent upon ob- 

 servation of facts at all, but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's 

 camel, out of its author's own pregnant inner consciousness. The 

 Roman poet would no doubt have built an excellent superstructure if 

 he had only possessed a little straw to make his bricks of. As it was, 

 however, scientific brick-making being still in its infancy, he could 

 only construct in a day a shadowy Aladdin's palace of pure fanciful 

 Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary world of imaginary atoms, for- 

 tuitously concurring out of void chaos into an orderly universe, as 

 though by miracle. It is not thus that systems arise which regenerate 

 the thought of humanity ; he who would build for all time must make 

 sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound bricks in jjlace of 

 the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation. 



It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began 

 to take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace, 

 Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our 

 modern evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were tbe 

 Joshuas who led the chosen people into the land which more than one 

 venturous ]Moses had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah 

 top of the eighteenth century. 



Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in 

 logical order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily 

 precede in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages 



