Prof. Le Conte as Seen Through His Biological Work. 223 



One other insight into his nature, properly obtained by ap- 

 proaching him from the biological direction, I must touch 

 upon in conclusion. I refer to his attitude toward the doc- 

 trine of evolution. This admirably illustrates both his abso- 

 lute fealty to scientific truth and the depth and sincerity of 

 his devotion to the essentials of religion. 



The particularly admirable and significant thing about this 

 attitude is not that he stood as one of the ablest, fairest- 

 minded champions of both religion and evolution, but the fact 

 of his having become such a champion. It is a less distinc- 

 tion for him that he of zaf write the "Evolution in Its Relation 

 to Religious Thought" than that he coidd wni& it. Weighty 

 as are the arguments on the printed pages of the book for the 

 fundamental accord of scientific and religious truth, weightier 

 still, I think, are those it contains that are not printed at all. 

 It is the life of the man; the history of the development of 

 his mind, to be read only between the lines, that should give 

 it its greatest value, particularly for those of its readers who 

 stand chiefly on the side of religion. 



Professor I^e Conte did not become an evolutionist fully un- 

 til he was fifty years old, and for most of his life before this he 

 was very far from being one. Listen to this and see what a. 

 strange sound it has in contrast with what we have all been 

 so accustomed to hear him teach: "They [organic species] 

 have remained unchanged in spite of changes in physical 

 conditions. ^ * * Physical conditions may destroy but not 

 transmute them. * * * The conclusion, therefore, is irre- 

 sistible, that organic forms have no physical cause, but they 

 must be referred directly to the Great First Cause, or else that 

 each spiicies has a distinct immaterial essence, which is the 

 cause of its specific form," These sentences were being writ- 

 ten in 1858, the very year in which Darwin's great discovery 

 of natural selection was first given to the world. The con- 

 ceptions nevertheless here given expression to were held by 

 him essentially for another decade at least; until the "Origin 

 of Species" had been long before the world, and after 



