EVOLUTION 33 



types and species of living beings. Long before Darwin's 

 book appeared evolution had been a recognised force in the 

 moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace 

 had worked out the development of suns and earths from 

 white-hot star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution 

 of the earth's surface to its present highly complex geo- 

 graphical condition. Lamarck had worked out the descent 

 of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow 

 modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth 

 of mind from its simplest beginnings to its highest outcome 

 in human thought. 



But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these 

 things. The evolutionary principles had never been put 

 into a single big book, asked for at Mudie's, and permitted 

 to lie on the drawing-room table side by side with the last 

 new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court 

 memoirs.' Therefore Society ignored them and knew them 

 not ; the word evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into 

 its polite and refined dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised 

 only the ' Darwinian theory,' ' natural selection,' ' the miss- 

 ing link,' and the belief that men were merely monkeys 

 who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon them. 

 To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented 

 and patented the entire business, including descent with 

 modification, if such notions ever occurred at all to the 

 world-at-large's speculative intelligence. 



Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth 

 and older antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing- 

 room view would lead us to imagine. It is a very ancient 

 and respectable theory indeed, and it has an immense 

 variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it 

 back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the 

 vague and indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The 

 great original Roman poet the only original poet in the 



D 



