EVOLUTION : WHAT IT IS NOT, AND WHAT IT IS. 645 



words — " can show that modiQcatioD has effected and is effecting great 

 changes in all organisms, subject to modifying influences." They can 

 show, he goes on (if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), 

 that any existing plant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins 

 to undergo adaptive changes of form and structure ; that in successive 

 generations these changes continue, till the plant or animal acquires 

 totally new habits ; that in cultivated plants and domesticated ani- 

 mals changes of the sort habitually occur ; that the diffei'ences thus 

 caused, as, for example, in dogs, are often greater than those on which 

 species in the wild state are founded, and that throughout all organic 

 nature there is at work a modifying influence of the same sort as that 

 which they believe to have caused the differences of species — " an in- 

 fluence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions of 

 years, and under the great variety of conditions which geological rec- 

 ords imply, any amount of change." What is this but pure Darwin- 

 ism, as the drawing-room philosopher still understands the word? 

 And yet it was written seven years before Darwin published the " Ori- 

 gin of Species." 



The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians 

 before Darwin. Here are a few of them — Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, 

 Oken, Bates, Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, 

 and Herbert Spencer. Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of him- 

 self discovered anything. As well say that Luther made the German 

 Reformation, that Leonardo made the Italian Renaissance, or that 

 Robespierre made the French Revolution, as say that Charles Darwin, 

 and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary movement, even in 

 the restricted field of life only. A thousand predecessors worked up 

 toward him ; a thousand contemporaries helped to diffuse and to con- 

 firm his various principles. 



Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the special 

 notion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that, while 

 plants and animals vary perpetually and very indefinitely, all the varie- 

 ties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances of the 

 species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because 

 every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the struggle 

 for life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, because 

 every point of advantage similarly tells in the individual's favor in that 

 ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to the evolutionary- 

 concept, fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the general prin- 

 ciple of descent with modification, that won over the whole world to 

 the "Darwinian theory." Before Darwin, many men of science were 

 evolutionists ; after Darwin, all men of science became so at once, and 

 the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow their leadership. 



As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this — that 

 plants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitive 

 living creature, which was itself the product of light and heat acting 



