194 CHARLES DARWIN 



story of prehistoric man. On the facts so gained, 

 Lubbock and Tylor, Schaafhausen and Biichner, would 

 have built up their various consistent theories of human 

 development and human culture. In short, even with- 

 out Charles Darwin, the nineteenth century would not 

 have stood still ; it would have followed in the wake of 

 Buffon and Diderot, of Lamarck and Laplace, of St. 

 Hilaire and Goethe, of Kant and Herschel, of Hutton 

 and Lyell, of Malthus and of Spencer. The great world 

 never rolls down the abysses of time obedient to the 

 nod of one single overruling Titanic intellect. 'If 

 the doctrine of evolution had not existed,' says Huxley, 

 * palaeontologists must have invented it.' 



But Charles Darwin acted, nevertheless, the part of 

 an immense and powerful accelerating energy. The 

 impetus which he gave gained us at least fifty years of 

 progress; it sent us at a bound from Copernicus to 

 Newton ; so far as ordinary minds were concerned, in- 

 deed, it transcended at a single leap the whole interval 

 from Ptolemy to Herschel. The comparison is far from 

 being a mere rhetorical one. A close analogy really exists 

 between the two cases. Before Copernicus, the earth 

 stood fixed and immovable in the centre of the universe, 

 with obsequious suns, and. planets, and satellites dancing 

 attendance in cycle and epicycle around the solid mass, 

 to which by day and night they continually ministered. 

 The great astronomical revolution begun by Copernicus, 

 Galileo, and Kepler, and completed by Newton, Laplace, 

 and Herschel, reduced the earth to its true position as 

 a petty planet, revolving feebly among its bigger brethren 

 round a petty sun, in some lost corner of a vast, majestic, 

 arid almost illimitable galaxy. Even so, before Darwin, 



