192 CHARLES DARWIN 



CHAPTER XII. 



THE NET RESULT. 



now let us ask ourselves, in all sincerity, what was 

 the final outcome and net result of Darwin's great and 

 useful life ? 



If Charles Darwin had never existed at all, there 

 would still have been a considerable and expansive 

 evolutionary movement both in biology and in its sister 

 sciences throughout the latter half of the present 

 century. The harvest indeed was ready, and the 

 labourers, though few, were full of vigour. Suppose 

 for a moment that that earnest and single-hearted Dar- 

 winian genius had been cut off by some untimely disease 

 of childhood at five years old, all other conditions 

 remaining as they were, we should even so have had in 

 our midst to-day, a small philosophical and influential 

 band of evolutionary workers. Spencer would none 

 the less have given us his ' First Principles ' and the 

 major part of his ' Principles of Biology,' with com- 

 paratively little alteration or omission. Wallace would 

 none the less have promulgated his inchoate theory of 

 natural selection, and rallied round his primordial con- 

 ception the very best and deepest minds of the biological 

 fraction. Geology would have enforced the continuity 



