THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN 17 



remarkable indirect influence on the side current of 

 biological and speculative opinion. In particular, as we 

 shall more fully see hereafter, it had an immediate effect 

 in suggesting to the mind of the great naturalist who 

 forms our present subject the embryo idea of l natural 

 selection.' 



Such then was the intellectual and social world into 

 which, early in the present century, Charles Darwin 

 found himself born. Everywhere around him in his 

 childhood and youth these great but formless evolu- 

 tionary ideas were brewing and fermenting. The 

 scientific society of his elders and of the contemporaries 

 among whom he grew up was permeated with the 

 leaven of Laplace and of Lamarck, of Hutton and of 

 Herschel. Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as 

 to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among 

 plants and animals. Those who believed in the doctrine 

 of BufFon and of the ' Zoonomia ' and those who dis- 

 believed in it, alike, were profoundly interested and 

 agitated in soul by the far-reaching implications of 

 that fundamental problem. On every side evolutionism, 

 in its crude form, was already in the air. Long before 

 Charles Darwin himself published his conclusive ' Origin 

 of Species,' every thinking mind in the world of science, 

 elder and younger, was deeply engaged upon the self-same 

 problem. Lyell and Homer in alternate fits were doubt- 

 ing and debating. Herbert Spencer had already frankly 

 accepted the new idea with the profound conviction of 

 a priori reasoning. Agassiz was hesitating and raising 

 difficulties. Treviranus was ardently proclaiming his un- 

 flinching adhesion. Oken was spinning in metaphy- 

 sical Germany his fanciful parodies of the Lamarckian 

 3 



