DARWIN'S THEORY UNSHAKEN 



IT seems ill-mannered, if not ill-natured, that the year 

 of the centenary of Charles Darwin's birth should 

 have been chosen by owners of anonymous pens in order 

 to alarm the public mind with the preposterous state- 

 ment that his celebrated and universally accepted theory 

 of the origin of the species or kinds of plants and animals 

 by natural selection, or " the survival of favoured races in 

 the struggle for life," is undermined and discredited. 

 Such a statement once coolly made in the public Press 

 is necessarily believed by a large number of uninformed 

 readers, and, like all calumny, is none the less relished 

 by the foolish, and, for the moment, none the less harmful, 

 because it is baseless. 



Those who seek to belittle Darwin's theory show, 

 whenever they venture to enter into particulars, that 

 they do not know what Darwin's theory is. They con- 

 fuse it with other theories, and even imagine that some 

 enthusiastic Darwinians who have tried to add a chapter 

 here or there to Darwin's doctrine, are opponents of the 

 great theory. Let me briefly state what that theory is : 



It rests on three groups of facts matters of observa- 

 tion, which are not theory or guess-work at all but 

 admitted by every one and demonstrated every day. 

 These are (i) Living things, each in its kind, produce 



