94 THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE 



early days of the Victorian epoch. But 

 here, as in the case of the doctrine of the 

 conservation of energy, the historian of 

 the inductive sciences has no prophetic 

 insight ; not even a suspicion of that 

 which the near future was to bring forth. 

 And those who still repeat the once favor- 

 Darwin ite objection that Darwin's 'Origin of 

 Species ' is nothing but a new version of 

 the 'Philosophic zoologique' will find 

 that, so late as 1844, Whewell had not 

 the slightest suspicion of Darwin's main 

 theorem, even as a logical possibility. In 

 fact, the publication of that theorem by 

 Darwin and Wallace, in 1859, took all 

 the biological world by surprise. Neither 

 those who were inclined towards the 

 'progressive transmutation' or 'develop- 

 ment ' doctrine, as it was then called, nor 

 those who were opposed to it, had the 

 slightest suspicion that the tendency to 

 variation in living beings, which all ad- 

 mitted as a matter of fact ; the selective 



