CHARLES DARWIN. 
By AuGcusTt WEISMANN. 
Forty-one years ago, when I delivered my inaugural address as a 
professor of this university, I took as my subject “ The Justification 
of the Darwinian Theory.” It is a great pleasure to me to be able 
to lecture again on the same subject on the hundredth anniversary 
of the birth of Darwin. 
This time, however, I need not speak of justifying the theory, for 
in the interval it has conquered the whole world. Yet there remains 
much that may be said—much, indeed, that ought to be said at the 
present time. In my former lecture I compared the theory of descent 
or evolution to the Copernican Cosmogony in its importance for the 
progress of human knowledge, and there were many who thought 
the comparison extravagant. But it needs no apology now that the 
idea of evolution has been thoroughly elaborated, and has become 
the basis of the science of life. 
You know that Darwin was not the only one, and was not even 
the first, to whom the idea of evolution occurred; it had arisen in 
several great minds half a century earlier, and it may therefore be 
thought an injustice to give, as we now do, almost all the credit of 
this fruitful discovery to Darwin alone. 
But history is a severe and inexorable judge. She awards the 
palm not to him in whose mind an idea first arises, but to him who 
so establishes it that it takes a permanent place in scientific thought, 
for it is only then that it becomes fruitful of, and an instrument for, 
human progress. The credit for thus establishing the theory of 
evolution is shared with Charles Darwin only by his contemporary, 
Alfred Russel Wallace, of whom we shall have to speak later. 
Nevertheless, a reflection of the discoverer’s glory falls upon those 
who, about the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, were able to attain to the conception of evolu- 
tion, notwithstanding the incomparably smaller number of facts 
@An address delivered at the University of Freiburg on the occasion of the 
Centenary of Darwin. Reprinted by permission from The Contemporary Re- 
view July, 1909. 
431 
