Permanence and Evolution. 119 



Eminent German Darwinians, or rather hyper- 

 Darwinians, have said that the hypothesis of 

 evolution in its strictly Darwinian form is no 

 more to be considered an hypothesis than the 

 law of gravitation ; and we are told that the one 

 proves itself true by explaining the facts, as 

 much as the other. But here the fallacy lies in 

 the word explain. Newton went through a 

 number of calculations stupendously vast, com- 

 plicated, and exact, and found that these calcu- 

 lations came . exactly right when compared with 

 the facts of nature. If this had not been possible, 

 and had not been done, Newton's labours would 

 have gone to limbo with those of many others 

 who united much crude and semi-mythological 

 speculation with more or less prevision of, in a 

 very general sense, the kind of views which 

 science was destined to establish a long time 

 after they were dead. 



For whether we take strict Darwinism or 

 any other form of evolutionism, we shall still 



