Sept. 15, 1887] 



NATURE 



463 



nicalities and of reference to scientific authorities in the form of 

 foot-notes (which last, I need scarcely point out, would have 

 largely increased its dimensions) brought its closely-reasoned 

 argument within the comprehension of hundreds whom it 

 would have at once repelled had it been made up of learned 

 phraseology. 



Much of what followed on the publication of this work will be 

 in the recollection of many of my audience, while the rest must 

 have heard of it from their seniors. The ever-memorable meeting 

 of this Association at Oxford in the summer of i860 saw the first 

 open conflict between the professors of the new faith and the 

 adherents of the old one. Far be it from me to blame those 

 among the latter who honestly stuck to the creed in which they 

 had educated themselves ; but my admiration is for the few 

 dauntle s men who, without flinching from the unpopularity of 

 their cause, flung themselves in the way of obloquy, and im- 

 petuously assaulted the ancient citadel in which the sanctity of 

 "Species" was enshrined and worshipped as a palladium. 

 However strongly I myself sympathized with them, I cannot 

 fairly state that the conflict on this occasion was otherwise than 

 a drawn battle ; and thus matters stood when in the following 

 year the Association met in this city. That, as I have already 

 said, was a time of "slack water." But though the ancient beliefs 

 were not much troubled, it was for the last time that they could 

 be said to prevail ; and thus I look upon our meeting in Man- 

 chester in 1861 as a crisis in the history of biology. All the same, 

 the ancient beliefs were not allowed to pass wholly unchallenged ; 

 and one thing is especially to be marked — they were challenged 

 by one who was no naturalist at all, by one who was a severe 

 thinker no less than an active worker ; one who was generally 

 right in his logic, and never wrong in his instinct ; one who, 

 though a politician, was invariably an honest man — I mean the 

 late Prof. Fawcett. On this occasion he brought the clearness 

 of his mental vision to bear upon Mr. Darwin's theory, with the 

 result that Mr. Darwin's method of investigation was shown to 

 be strictly in accordance with the rules of deductive philosophy, 

 and to throw light where all was dark before. 



Now the reason why I have especially mentioned this essay 

 of Prof. Fawcett's is not merely that the approval of the dis- 

 puted theory by such a man did not a little contribute to the 

 success which was then impending, but because I have for a 

 long while maintained that, as a matter of fact, what is now 

 known as the Darwinian theory did not, except in one small 

 point, require a naturalist — and much less naturalists of such 

 eminence as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace — to think it out and 

 establish its truth. Pray do not for a moment imagine that I 

 wish to detract from the value of their demonstration of a dis- 

 covery that is almost unrivalled in its importance when I say 

 that the demonstration might have been perfectly well made by 

 any reflective person who was aided by that small amount of 

 information as to the condition of things around him which is 

 presumably possessed by everybody of common sense. It might 

 have been perfectly well made by any of the sages of antiquity. 

 It might have been as well made by any reasoning man of 

 modern time, even though he were innocent of the merest rudi- 

 ments of zoology or botany ; and, as is admitted, the discovery 

 was partly and almost unconsciously made by Dr. Wells in 1813, 

 and again by Mr. Patrick Matthew in 1831 — neither of whom 

 pretended to any special knowledge of those branches of science. 

 It is equally a fact that anyone who applied the doctrine of 

 Malthus, the political economist, to the animal and vegetable popu- 

 lations of the world, could have seen that what came to be called 

 " n.atural selection " was the necessary consequence of the prin- 

 ciples enunciated by him ; and we have Mr. Darwin's acknow- 

 ledgment that his reading the "Essay" of Malthus was with 

 him the turning-point which settled his conviction as to the 

 soundness of the crude speculations in which he had been in- 

 dulging. Moreover, years before Malthus wrote, a great French 

 writer, though no naturalist, had pointed out, in terms that were 

 mutatis mutandis repeated as regards plants at a later time by 

 the elder De Candolle, that all animals were perpetually at 

 war ; that each, with a few exceptions, was born to devour 

 others ; and that the males of the same species carried on an 

 internecine war for the females.^ The fact of the "struggle for 



' " Tous les animaux sont perpetuellement en guerre ; chaque espece est 

 nrfe pour en ddiforer uoe autre. II n'y a pa^ jusqu'aux moutons et aux 

 colombes qui n'avalent une quantitc prodigieuse d'animiux imperceptibles. 

 Les males de la ineme espece se font la guerre pour les feraelles, comme 

 Menelas et Paris. L'air, la terre, et les eaux sent des champs de destruc- 

 tion."— Voltaire, "Questions sur 1' Encyclopedic par des A-nateurs," article 

 " Guerre." 



life " being thus recognized, all the rest should follow, and really 

 no close acquaintance with natural history was needed to guide 

 an investigator to the end so far reached. 



But in order to see the effect of this principle upon organic 

 life the knowledge — the peculiar knowledge — of the naturalist 

 was required. This was the knowledge of those slight varia- 

 tions which are found in all groups of animals and plants — a 

 point on which I need not now dwell, for to my present audience 

 it must be known in thousands of instances. Herein lay the 

 triumph of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace. That triumph, how- 

 ever, was not celebrated in Manchester. The question was of 

 such magnitude as to need another year's incubation, and the 

 crucial struggle came a twelvemonth later, when the Associa- 

 tion met at Cambridge. The victory of the new doctrine was 

 then declared in a way that none could doubt. I have no 

 inclination to join in the pursuit of the fugitives. 



But in tracing briefly, as I am now doing, the acceptance of 

 the teaching of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, there is one 

 point on which I should like to dwell for a few moments, 

 because it has, so far as I know, been very much neglected. 

 This is the great service rendered to the new theory by one who 

 was its most determined opponent, by one of whom I wish to 

 speak with the utmost respect, by one who was thoroughly a 

 philosophical naturalist, and yet pushed his philosophy to over- 

 step the verge of— I fear I must say — absurdity. I mean 

 the late Prof. Louiz Agassiz, whose labours in so many ways 

 deserve far higher praise than it is in my power to bestow. 

 There must be many here present who will recollect the 

 time when the question "What is a 'Species'?" was al- 

 ways coming up to plague the mind of every zoologist and 

 botanist. That question never received a definite answer, and 

 yet every zoologist and botanist of those days felt that an answer 

 ought to be given to it ; for without one they knew that they 

 were sailing on an unknown sea, and that theirs was likely to be 

 lost labour. The chief reason why no answer was given lay in 

 the fact that hardly any two zoologists or botanists could agree 

 as to the kind of reply which should be made, for hardly any 

 two of them could agree as to how a " Species " was constituted. 

 It will be enough for me to say now that Louis Agassiz pinned 

 his faith on every " Species" being not merely the result of a single 

 direct act of creation, but, when he found that physical barriers 

 interposed (as they often do) between two or more parts of 1 he 

 area which the "Species" occupied, he did not hesitate to 

 declare that a "Species" might have been created directly in 

 several places, at sundry times, and even in vast numbers. If 

 the same Species of freshwater fish, for instance, was found in 

 several rivers which had no intercommunication, it had been, 

 he asserted, separately created in each. Before his time people 

 had been content to talk of each Species having had a single 

 birthplace— its own "Centre of Creation" — but he maintained 

 that many Species must have had several Centres of Creation, 

 and creation was in his mind no figurative expression. He 

 meant by it, just as Linnaeus before him had meant, a direct act 

 of God ; in other words, his belief was that there had been 

 going on around us a series of mysterious performances, not one 

 of which had ever been consciously witnessed by a human eye, 

 but each of which had for its object the independent forma' ion 

 of a new living being, animal, or plant. That is to say, that 

 there had been going on from time indefinite a continuous series 

 of operations which could only be termed miraculous, since 

 there was no known natural law by means of which they could 

 be produced. Though the author of this theory was, in the 

 country of his adoption, regarded as the especial champion of 

 opinions that are commonly termed orthodox, it is not surpris- 

 ing that many minds revolted from such a conclusion as it re- 

 quired — a conclusion which they not unfitly deemed a reductio 

 ad absurdum. Yet the position of Prof. Agassiz was perfectly 

 logical when once his premises were admitted ; and, more than 

 that, it became obvious to all clear-seeing men that one of these 

 alternatives must be adopted — either Agassiz's logical doctrine 

 of centres of creation, or the theory of the transmutation of 

 species, which had been so long condemned because no reason- 

 able explanation of its modus operandi was known. 



I have called these alternative opinions because I believe that 

 no third course had been suggested by any naturalist, and yet it 

 is hard to say which of them was most unpalatable to the world 

 at large. On the one hand, people were called upon to believe 

 that man was in some inexplicable and unaccountable way pro- 

 duced from a monad. On the other hand, they were called upon 

 to believe that the inhabitants, vegetable and animal, whether 



