1 66 CHARLES DARWIN 



at the Royal Institution his famous address on the 

 Coming of Age of the ' Origin of Species.' The time 

 was a favourable one for reviewing the silent and almost 

 unobserved progress of a great revolution. Twenty- 

 one years had come and gone since the father of modern 

 scientific evolutionism had launched upon the world his 

 tentative work. In those twenty-one years the thought 

 of humanity had been twisted around as upon some 

 invisible pivot, and a new heaven and a new earth had 

 been presented to the eyes of seers and thinkers. One- 

 and-twenty years before, despite the influence of Hutton 

 and of Lyell, the dominant view of the earth's past 

 history revealed but one vast and lawless succession of 

 hideous catastrophes. Wholesale creations and whole- 

 sale extinctions, world-wide cataclysms followed by fresh 

 world-wide births of interwoven faunas and floras 

 these, said Huxley, were the ordinary machinery of the 

 geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied 

 genius of the mighty Cuvier. One-and-twenty years 

 after, the opponents themselves had given up the game 

 in its fullest form as lost beyond the hope of possible 

 restitution. Some hesitating thinkers, it is true, while 

 accepting the evolutionary doctrine more or less in its 

 earlier form, like Mivart and Meehan, yet refused their 

 assent on one ground or another to the specific Darwinian 

 doctrine of natural selection. Others, like Wallace, 

 made a special exception with regard to the development 

 of the human species, which they supposed to be due to 

 other causes from those implied in the remainder of the 

 organic scale. Yet on the whole, biological science had 

 fairly carried the day in favour of evolution, in one form 

 or another, and not even the cavillers dared now to sug- 



