107 
Darwin Firry Years Arter. 
By Dr. Davin STARR JORDAN. 
Scientific men, as a rule, do not pay much attention to birthdays; but 
certain anniversaries have been impressed upon our minds of late, and in 
the last two years there have been many celebrations: The two hundredth 
anniversay of Linnaeus, and the one hundred and fiftieth of his great work, 
“Systema Nature’; the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Agassiz, 
the greatest teacher of science; the one hundredth anniversay of the birth- 
day of Charles Darwin, and the fifth anniversary of the publication of 
“The Origin of Species,’ the greatest landmark of the history of the nine- 
teenth century. Twenty-five years ago we note another landmark of im- 
port to us. It was then that Amos Butler brought his Brookville academy 
to Indianapolis, where its first meeting was held on December 29, 1885. As 
I was just then elected president of Indiana University, the youngest of 
all the college presidents—and the greenest—hbeing, therefore, by some 
preferred to the drier article, I was made president. With this came the 
suggestion that two others who, like myself, had fought each year on the 
bloody sands of the educational arena of Indiana—John Coulter and Har- 
vey Wiley—would be my successors. 
At that time the idea of evolution was in the air, the theory of descent, 
that the forms now living were created, not by mysterious power, but by 
the operation of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. It was 
my fortune to have been brought up as a student of Agassiz, having heard 
all his lectures on this subject, and inherited his prepossessions. It was 
my own studies of animals which led me little by little to become an eyo- 
lutionist, and I have said that I went over to that view of the case about 
as graciously and as willingly as a cat which a boy draws across the carpet 
by its tail. , 
I remember it was out at Broad Ripple, just north of this city, where 
Sopeland and myself first definitely decided that we were converts to Dar- 
winism. The little sand darter in the river is a sort of perch, but differs 
from any others in having very few scales, and these very thin ones. We 
testified to our faith by an article in which we said that these little animals 
are derived from the scaly perches; that we did not know whether it has 
