4 CHARLES DARWIN 



proponnder of the theory which supposes the descent of 

 man to be traceable from a remote and more or less 

 monkey-like ancestor. Now, as a matter of fact, Darwin 

 was not the prime originator of either of these two 

 great cardinal ideas. Though he held both as part of 

 his organised theory of things, he was not by any 

 means the first or the earliest thinker to hold them or 

 to propound them publicly. Though he gained for 

 them both a far wider and more general acceptance 

 than they had ever before popularly received, he laid 

 no sort of claim himself to originality or proprietorship 

 in either theory. The grand idea which he did really 

 originate was not the idea of ' descent with modifica- 

 tion,' but the idea of 'natural selection/ by which 

 agency, as he was the first to prove, definite kinds of 

 plants and animals have been slowly evolved from 

 simpler forms, with definite adaptations to the special 

 circumstances by which they are surrounded. In a 

 word, it was the peculiar glory of Charles Darwin, not 

 to have suggested that all the variety of animal and 

 vegetable life might have been produced by slow modi- 

 fications in one or more original types, but to have 

 shown the nature of the machinery by which such a 

 result could be actually attained in the practical working 

 out of natural causes. He did not invent the develop- 

 ment theory, but he made it believable and comprehen- 

 sible. He was not, as most people falsely imagine, the 

 Moses of evolutionism, the prime mover in the biological 

 revolution; he was the Joshua who led the world of 

 thinkers and workers into full fruition of that promised 

 land which earlier investigators had but dimly descried 

 from the Pisgah-top of conjectural speculation. 



