Organic Evolution 277 



time intense opposition and in many quarters intense hatred. 

 They were criticised from every point of view, and seldom 

 has a writer been more violently attacked and abused. Now 

 what seems so wonderful in Darwin was that at any rate 

 as far as we can know he took both criticism and abuse 

 with mild serenity. What he wanted to do was to find the 

 truth, and he carefully considered any criticism, and if it 

 helped him to his goal he thanked the critic and used his 

 new facts. He never wasted time in replying to those who 

 fulminated against him, he passed them by and went on 

 with his search. 



It is a somewhat remarkable fact that whilst the works 

 of Darwin stimulated an immense amount of research in 

 Biology, this research did not at first take the line he 

 himself had traced. With some exceptions, the leading 

 zoological work of the end of the last century took the form 

 of embryology, morphology, and palaeontology; and such 

 subjects as cell-lineage, the minute structure of protoplasm, 

 life-histories, teratology, have occupied the minds of those 

 who interest themselves in the problems of life. Among 

 all these lines of research man has been seeking for the 

 solution of that secret of nature which at the bottom of his 

 heart he knows he will never find, and yet the pursuit of 

 which is his one abiding interest. Had Francis Balfour 

 lived we should, probably, have sooner returned to the broader 

 lines of research as practised by Darwin, for it was Balfour's 

 intention to turn himself to the physiology using the term 

 in its widest sense of the lower animals. Towards the 

 end of the nineteenth century, stimulated by Galton, Weldon 

 began those series of measurements and observations which 

 have culminated in the establishment of a great school of 

 Eugenics and Statistics in London. With the beginning of 

 the twentieth century came the rediscovery of the neglected 

 facts recorded by Gregor Mendel, Abbot of Brunn, some 

 years before, and with that rediscovery an immediate and 

 enormous outburst of enthusiasm and of work. Mendel 

 had placed a new instrument in the hand of the breeder, 

 an instrument which, when he has learnt to use it, may give 

 him a power over all domesticated animals and cultivated 

 crops undreamt of before. We are getting a new insight 



