A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



not laymen merely, but a vast preponderance of the 

 leaders of science also. 



With the open-minded minority, on the other hand, 

 the theory of natural selection made its way by leaps 

 and bounds. Its delightful simplicity which at first 

 sight made it seem neither new nor important coupled 

 with the marvellous comprehensiveness of its implica- 

 tions, gave it a hold on the imagination, and secured it 

 a hearing where other theories of transmutation of spe- 

 cies had been utterly scorned. Men who had found 

 Lamarck's conception of change through voluntary 

 effort ridiculous, and the vaporings of the Vestiges al- 

 together despicable, men whose scientific cautions held 

 them back from Spencer's deductive argument, took 

 eager hold of that tangible, ever-present principle of 

 natural selection, and were led on and on to its goal. 

 Hour by hour the attitude of the thinking world tow- 

 ards this new principle changed; never before was so 

 great a revolution wrought so suddenly. 



Nor was this merely because "the times were ripe" 

 or "men's minds prepared for evolution." Darwin 

 himself bears witness that this was not altogether so. 

 All through the years in which he brooded this theory 

 he sounded his scientific friends, and could find among 

 them not one who acknowledged a doctrine of trans- 

 mutation. The reaction from the stand-point of La- 

 marck and Erasmus Darwin and Goethe had been 

 complete, and when Charles Darwin avowed his own 

 conviction he expected always to have it met with 

 ridicule or contempt. In 1857 there was but one man 

 speaking with any large degree of authority in the world 

 who openly avowed a belief in transmutation of species 



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