JEFFRIES WYMAN 193 



May 26, 1864: "All you say about the pay of the soldiers puts 

 the government in a very shabby light; its members are disgracing 

 themselves in the eyes of the world." 



Evolution was a real and serious issue during the last fifteen 

 years of Wyman 's life. The first edition of Darwin's The Origin 

 of Species appeared in the fall of I85Q. 1 Like Asa Gray, Wil- 

 liam B. Rogers and some others Wyman felt no antagonism toward 

 the new theory and was even somewhat prepossessed in its favor. 

 But the formulation and publication of his views were delayed and 

 modified by his natural deliberation and dislike of controversy; 

 possibly, also, by the pronounced opposition of his nearest col- 

 league, Agassiz. His first distinct public expression of opinion 

 seems to have been in the following paragraph from his review 

 of Owen's " Monograph of the Aye- Aye," in the American Journal 

 of Science, 26. series, vol. 36, 1863, pp. 294-299: 



"We conclude with expressing the belief, that there is no just 

 ground for taking, and that we arrive at no reasonable theory 

 which takes, a position intermediate between the two extremes. 

 We must either assume, on the one hand, that living organisms 

 commenced their existence fully formed, and by processes not in 

 accordance with the usual order of nature as it is revealed to hu- 

 man minds, or, on the other hand, that each species became such 

 by progressive development or transmutation; that, as in the in- 

 dividual, so in the aggregate of races, the simple forms were not 

 only the precursors, but the progenitors of the complex ones, and 

 that thus the order of nature, as commonly manifest in her works, 

 was maintained." 



For Wyman the foregoing was quite emphatic. How keenly 

 he realized the situation appears in the following extract from a 

 letter written in 1871 (undated, but received by me on May 30): 



December loth, 1905, printed in Alexander's Magazine for January, 1906. 

 See also the address referred to in the previous note. 



1 At that time the present writer had just entered Wyman's laboratory and 

 begun to attend the meetings of the Boston Society of Natural History. He 

 recalls with awe the earnest discussions among the intellectual giants of the 

 day. 



