184 CHARLES DARWIN 



governmental organisation and their ecclesiastical polity. 

 Taking from biology the evolving savage, viewed as a 

 developed and highly gifted product of the anthropoid 

 stock, it has shown by what stages and through what 

 causes he has slowly aggregated into tribes and nations ; 

 has built up his communal, polygamic, or monogamic 

 family; has learnt the use of fire, of implements, of 

 pottery, of metals ; has developed the whole resources 

 of oral speech and significant gesture ; has invented 

 writing, pictorial or alphabetic ; has grown up to science, 

 to philosophy, to morals, and to religion. The chief 

 honours of this particular line of enquiry, the latest and 

 youngest of all to receive the impact of the evolutionary 

 impulse, belong mainly to Tylor, Lubbock, and Spencer 

 in England, and to Haeckel, De Mortillet, and Wagner 

 on the continent. 



In the sublime conception of the external universe 

 and its present workings which we thus owe to the inde- 

 pendent efforts of so many great progressive thinkers, 

 and which has here been briefly and inadequately 

 sketched out, Darwin's work in life falls naturally into 

 its own place as the principal contribution to the evo- 

 lutionary movement in the special biological depart- 

 ment of thought. Within the more limited range of 

 that department itself,' the evolutionary impulse did 

 not owe its origin to Charles Darwin personally ; it took 

 its rise with Erasmus Darwin, Buffon, and Lamarck, 

 and it derived from our great modern English naturalist 

 its final explanation and definitive proof alone. But 

 just as the evolutionary movement in astronomy and 

 cosmical thought is rightly associated in all our minds 

 with the mighty theories of Kant, Laplace, and Her- 



