ATTITUDE OF WORKING NATURALISTS. 237 



vigor and a raison d'etre for the present day. This 

 latter he did, not only by bringing forward a vera 

 causa in the survival of the fittest under changing cir- 

 cumstances — about which the question among natural- 

 ists mainly is how much it will explain, some allowing 

 it a restricted, others an unlimited operation — but also 

 by showing that the theory may be made to do work, 

 may shape and direct investigations, the results of 

 which must in time tell us whether the theory is likely 

 to hold good or not. If the hypothesis of natural 

 selection and the things thereto appertaining had not 

 been capable of being put to useful work, although, 

 like the " Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," 

 it might have made no little noise in the world, it 

 would hardly have engaged the attention of working 

 naturalists as it has done. "We have no idea even of 

 opening the question as to what work the Darwinian 

 theory has incited, and in what way the work done has 

 reacted upon the theory ; and least of all do we like to 

 meddle with the polemical literature of the subject, 

 already so voluminous that the German bibliographers 

 and booksellers make a separate class of it. But two 

 or three treatises before us, of a minor or incidental 

 sort, suggest a remark or two upon the attitude of mind 

 toward evolutionary theories taken by some of the 

 working naturalists. 



Mr. Darwin's own expectation, that his new pre- 

 sentation of the subject would have little or no effect 

 upon those who had already reached middle-age, has 

 — out of Paris — not been fulfilled. There are, indeed, 

 one or two who have thought it their duty to denounce 

 the theory as morally dangerous, as well as scientific 



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