THEORIES OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



wielding the keenest dialectic blade that was drawn 

 during the entire controversy. Then, too, unexpected 

 recruits were found in Sir John Lubbock and John 

 Tyndall, who carried the war eagerly into their respec- 

 tive territories; while Herbert Spencer, who had ad- 

 vocated a doctrine of transmutation on philosophic 

 grounds some years before Darwin published the key 

 to the mystery and who himself had barely escaped 

 independent discovery of that key lent his masterful 

 influence to the cause. In America the famous bot- 

 anist Asa Gray, who had long been a correspondent 

 of Darwin's but whose advocacy of the new theory 

 had not been anticipated, became an ardent propa- 

 gandist; while in Germany Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, 

 the youthful but already noted zoologist, took up the 

 fight with equal enthusiasm. 



Against these few doughty champions with here 

 and there another of less general renown was arrayed, 

 at the outset, practically all Christendom. The in- 

 terest of the question came home to every person of in- 

 telligence, whatever his calling, and the more deeply 

 as it became more and more clear how far-reaching 

 are the real bearings of the doctrine of natural selection. 

 Soon it was seen that should the doctrine of the sur- 

 vival of the favored races through the struggle for ex- 

 istence win, there must come with it as radical a change 

 in man's estimate of his own position as had come in 

 the day when, through the efforts of Copernicus and 

 Galileo, the world was dethroned from its supposed 

 central position in the universe. The whole conserva- 

 tive majority of mankind recoiled from this necessity 

 with horror. And this conservative majority included 



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