LECTURE X 



NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY 



DA-Rwin's book on the " Origin of Species " did not make its 

 way, even among men of science, without searching examination ; 

 and it is interesting to note that, in the early days of its history, 

 all of its most prominent advocates were English in their intellec- 

 tual training, although some, like Asa Gray, were not English bv 

 birth. Tyell, Wallace, Darwin, Gray, and Huxley knew Lamarck's 

 writings well, and, in this day of Neo-Lamarckism, we may find 

 profit in studying the influences that led all these vigorous and 

 independent thinkers to condemn his speculations as worse than 

 worthless^ while they welcomed natural selection as one of the 

 greatest triumphs of the human mind. 



The story of the reception of the " Origin," as it is told in 

 Darwin's letters, shows how it won its way in spite of prejudice. 

 Belief that the problem is one that man may hope to solve was rap- 

 idly growing among the thoughtful ; for a long series of brilliant 

 discoveries in embryology, in anatomy, in paleontology, in geograph- 

 ical biology, and in many other fields, had shown that zoology is 

 orderly, and exhibits laws, like other sciences ; but the remains 

 of so many failures lay beside the path of history that most cau- 

 tious students, in England at least, were in a hostile rather than a 

 sympathetic frame of mind, and were indisposed to welcome a 

 new attempt to bring all these classes of phenomena into a single 

 point of view. 



To men like Huxley, who had refused to have anything to 

 say to a necessary principle of universal progress, and had grown 

 weary of speculation, Darwin's book commended itself as strictly 

 scientific , for it is based upon the hard work of half a lifetime, 

 and, making no attempt to account for the fundamental properties 

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