IV 

 DARWIN'S DISCOVERIES 



A LARGE proportion of the public are not aware of 

 the amount of experiment and observation carried 

 out by the great naturalist whose memory was honoured 

 by a splendid ceremony at the University of Cambridge in 

 the summer of 1909. There are, I am sure, not a few who 

 are under the impression that Darwin, sitting in his study or 

 walking round his garden, had " a happy thought," namely, 

 that man is only a modified and improved monkey, and 

 proceeded to write an argumentative essay, setting forth 

 the conclusion that mankind are the descendants of some 

 remote ancestral apes. Of course there is an increasing 

 number of more careful and inquiring men and women who 

 take advantage of the small price at which Mr. Darwin's 

 wonderful book, The Origin of Species, is now to be 

 bought, and have read that and some of his other writings, 

 and accordingly know how far he was from being the hasty 

 and fanciful theorist they previously imagined him to be. 

 It is the great distinction of Darwin that he spent more 

 than twenty years of his life in accumulating the records 

 of an enormous series of facts and observations tending 

 to show that the species or "kinds" of animals and plants 

 in nature can and do change slowly, and that there is, 

 owing to the fact that every pair produces a great number 

 of offspring (sometimes many thousand), of which only 



