I5 8 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



so startling that, except for documentary evidence, I 

 should be sometimes inclined to think my memories 

 dreams." The like reflection arises when we con- 

 sider the indifference with which books of the most 

 daring and revolutionary character, both in theology 

 and morals, are treated nowadays, in contrast to the 

 uproar which greeted such a brutum fulmen as Essays 

 and Reviews. As for Colenso's Pentateuch, and 

 books of its type, orthodoxy has long taken them to 

 its bosom. 



So far as the larger number of naturalists, and of 

 the intelligent public who followed their lead, were 

 concerned, there was an absolutely open mind on 

 the question of the mutation of species. There had 

 been, as the foregoing sections of this book have 

 shown, a long time of preparation and speculation. 

 We certainly find the keynote of Evolution in 

 Heraclitus, and more than two thousand years after 

 his time Herbert Spencer, above all men, had re- 

 moved it from the empirical stage, and placed it on 

 a base broad as the facts which supported it. But 

 it needed the leaven of the human and personal 

 to stir it into life, and touch man in his various 

 interests; and not all that Mr. Spencer had done in 

 application of the theory of development to social 

 questions and institutions could avail much till Dar- 

 win's theory gave it practical shape. Dissertations 

 on the passage of the " homogeneous to the hetero- 

 geneous " ; explanations of the theory of the evo- 

 lution of complex sidereal systems out of diffused 



