6S4 



DARWIN 



Voyage of the Beagle, under government auspices, 

 to which great work (compiled by the leading 

 specialist authorities of the day) he himself con- 

 tributed an introduction and many notes. In 1842 

 appeared his work on The Structure and Distribu- 

 tion of Coral Reefs; in 1844, Geological Observations 

 on Volcanic Islands; and in 1846, Geological 

 Observations on South America. These works 

 placed him at once in the front rank of contem- 

 porary scientific thinkers. In 1851-53 appeared his 

 valuable treatise on barnacles, A Monograph of the 

 Cirripedia. 



Three years after his marriage Darwin settled 

 at Down, near Beckenham, in Kent, where for 

 the rest of his days he passed his time as a country 

 gentleman among his conservatories, his pigeons, 

 his garden, and his fowls. The practical informa- 

 tion thus gained (especially as regards variation 

 and interbreeding) was of invaluable use to him 

 in his later researches. Private means enabled 

 him to devote himself unremittingly henceforth, 

 in spite of continuous and distressing ill-health, 

 to the pursuit of science. It was at Down that 

 Darwin began to occupy himself with the great work 

 of his life the problem of the origin of species. 

 In 1837 he had already set out to accumulate facts 

 and observations for this purpose. After five years' 

 unremitting work, he 'allowed himself to specu- 

 late ' on the subject, and drew up some short notes, 

 which he enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of conclu- 

 sions for his own use. These conclusions embodied 

 in embryo the famous principle of natural selection, 

 the germ of the celebrated Darwinian Theory ( q. v. ). 

 "With constitutional caution, however, Darwin de- 

 layed publication of his hypothesis, which was only 

 at length precipitated many years later by an 

 accidental circumstance of a romantic character. 

 In 1858 Mr Alfred Kussel Wallace, the distin- 

 guished explorer, sent home from the Malay Archi- 

 pelago a memoir addressed to Darwin himself, for 

 presentation to the Linnean Society. On opening 

 this packet, Darwin found to his surprise that it 

 contained in essence the main idea of his own 

 theory of natural selection. Sir Charles Lyell and 

 Sir Joseph Hooker, to whom he communicated the 

 facts, persuaded Darwin to read a paper of his own 

 concomitantly with Wallace's before the Linnean 

 Society, which was accordingly done on July 1, 

 1858. Urged forward by this strange coincidence, 

 Darwin set to work seriously at once to condense 

 his vast mass of notes the labour of a lifetime 

 and put into shape his great work on The Origin of 

 Species by means of Natural Selection, published 

 in November 1859. For an account of the main 

 ideas there promulgated, see DARWINIAN THEORY. 

 The book itself, an epoch-making work, was 

 received throughout Europe with the deepest in- 

 terest, was violently attacked and energetically 

 defended, but in the end succeeded in obtaining 

 recognition ( with or without certain reservations ) 

 from almost all competent biologists. From the 

 day of its publication Darwin continued to work on 

 unremittingly at a great series of supplemental 

 treatises, in which his main principles were still 

 further enforced and enlarged, while minor corol- 

 laries were brought prominently into view. The 

 Fertilisation of Orchids appeared in 1862, The Vari- 

 ation of Plants and Animals under Domestication 

 in 1867, and The Descent of Man in 1871. The last- 

 named work, hardly less famous than the Origin of 

 Species, derives the human race from a hairy quad- 

 rumanous animal belonging to the great anthropoid 

 group, and related to the progenitors of the orang- 

 utan, chimpanzee, and gorilla. In this bpnk 

 Darwin also developed his important supplemennvy 

 theory of sexual selection, which on the whole lias 

 been received by scientific thinkers with less favour 

 than his other ideas. His later works are The 



Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 

 (1873), Insectivorous Plants (187 '5), Climbing Plants 

 ( 1875 ), The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation 

 in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), Different Forms 

 of Flowers in Plants of the same Species (1877), and 

 The Power of Movement in Plants ( 1880). His last 

 work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through 

 the action of Worms, appeared in 1881. In it Dar- 

 win showed grounds for believing that the vegetable 

 mould which covers a large part of the globe is 

 mainly due to the castings of earth-worms, without 

 which the greater portion of the land surface of the 

 world must necessarily consist of barren rock or 

 thirsty sand. 



It is, however, as the great leader of evolutionary 

 biology that Darwin will be mainly remembered 

 among men. Though not (as is commonly, but 

 erroneously, believed) himself the originator of the 

 evolution hypothesis, nor even the first to apply the 

 conception of descent with modification to plant 

 and animal organisms, Darwin was undoubtedly 

 the first thinker to gain for that conception a wide 

 acceptance among biological experts. By adding 

 to tne crude evolutionism of Erasmus Darwin, 

 Lamarck, and others, his own specific idea of 

 natural selection, he supplied to the idea a suffi- 

 cient cause, which raised it at once from the level 

 of a hypothesis to the grade of a verifiable theory. 

 His kindliness of character, honesty of purpose, 

 devotion to truth, and attachment to his friends, 

 rendered him no less remarkable on the moral and 

 emotional than on the purely intellectual side of 

 his nature. For many years his health had been 

 extremely feeble, and he had worked under the 

 severest physical disadvantages. He died sud- 

 denly, after a very short illness, April 19, 1882, and 

 was buried with unusual honours in Westminster 

 Abbey. See his Life and Letters by his son, Francis 

 Darwin (1887). 



Darwin, ERASMUS, physician, natural philo- 

 sopher, and didactic poet, was born 12th December 

 1731, at Elston Hall, near Newark, in Nottingham- 

 shire ; entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1750, 

 graduated B.A. in 1754, and afterwards studied 

 medicine at Edinburgh. After an unsuccessful 

 attempt to establish a practice at Nottingham, he 

 removed to Lichfield, where he married and became 

 a popular physician and prominent figure from his 

 ability, his radical and free-thinking opinions, his 

 poetry, his eight-acre botanical garden, and his im- 

 perious advocacy of temperance in drinking. After 

 his second marriage in 1781, he settled in Derby, and 

 then at Breadsall Priory, where he died suddenly 

 18th April 1802. Darwin had once a great reputa- 

 tion as a physiologist, but his system is, for the 

 most part, inconsequent, baseless, and untenable. 

 At the same time, many of his ideas are original, 

 suggestive, and contain within them the germs of 

 important truths. His strength and his weakness 

 lay in his faculty for seeing analogies in nature. 

 Sometimes he is exceedingly happy in his dis- 

 coveries ; at other times he is quite fantastical. 

 The same remarks hold good as regards his verse, 

 where, amid the frequent extravagance and in- 

 comprehensibility of his notions, there burst forth 

 strains of genuine poetry. The Loves of the Plants 

 (1789), a part of his chief poem, the Botanic 

 Garden, was happily burlesqued in the 'Loves of 

 the Triangles ' in the Anti-Jacobin. Interest in 

 Darwin's speculations has been revived by the 

 recognition of his partial anticipation of Lamarck's 

 views on evolution, and so of his own famous 

 grandson's. His chief works are Zoonomia, or the 

 Laws of Organic Life (1794-96); and his Phyto- 

 logia, or Philosophy of A griculture ( 1799 ). See his 

 Life by Krause, trans, by Dallas (1879). By his 

 first wife he was grandfather of Charles Darwin; 

 by his second, of Francis Galton. 



