THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS 123 



that man will see in it chiefly the implications that most 

 closely affect his own happiness and his own destiny. 

 The biological question of the origin of species is a 

 sufficiently wide one, but it includes also, among other 

 cases, the origin of the very familiar species Homo 

 sapiens of Linnaeus. Some theologians jumped at once at 

 the conclusion, right or wrong, that if Darwinism were 

 true man was nothing more than a developed monkey, 

 the immortal soul was an exploded myth, the founda- 

 tions of religion itself were shattered, and the wave of 

 infidelity was doomed to swamp the whole of Christen- 

 dom with its blank nihilism. Scientific men, on the 

 other hand, drew the conclusion that man must be 

 descended, like other mammals, from some common 

 early vertebrate ancestor, and that the current views of 

 his origin and destiny must be largely modified by the 

 evolutionary creed. Of this profound scientific belief 

 Professor Huxley's maiden work was the earliest out- 

 come. 



Meantime, on the continent of Europe and over-sea 

 in America, the Darwinian theory was being hotly 

 debated and warmly defended. France, coldly sceptical 

 and critical, positive rather than imaginative in matters 

 of science, and little prone by native cast of mind to 

 the evolutionary attitude, stood aloof to a great extent 

 from the onward course of the general movement. Here 

 and there, to be sure, a Gaudry or a Ribot, a Delbceuf 

 or a De Candolle (the two latter a Liege Belgian and a 

 Genevan Swiss) might heartily throw himself into the 

 new ideas, and contribute whole squadrons of geological 

 or botanical fact to the final victory. Yet, as a whole, 

 the dry and cautious French intelligence, ever inclined 



