THE THEORY OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 177 



fostered that scientific evolutionism was a new idea as late 

 as the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Among 

 English-speaking naturalists, however, "the theory was a 

 commonplace topic of discussion for two or three dec- 

 ades before 1859, and especially after the publication and 

 immense circulation of Robert Chamber's "Vestiges of 

 Creation, " of which the first edition appeared in 1844. Geol- 

 ogical textbooks of the period referred to the theory of 

 transmutation of species as a matter of course, though 

 usually only to reject it as an exploded hypothesis. 19 It is an 

 interesting fact in the history of thought that a more glar- 

 ing obtuseness is exhibited by the scientific mind, during 

 these decades before the " Origin," than was exhibited by 

 the naturalists of the eighteenth century who saw nothing 

 of significance in the evidence for evolution set forth by 

 Buffon and his contemporaries. It was Chambers, the lit- 

 erary man and amateur naturalist, who saw that which 

 Darwin had already seen, but that to which the majority 

 of technical workers were still blind. 



It is much to the credit of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) that 

 he accepted unreservedly the doctrine of organic evolution, 

 as shown by an early article of his upon the "Development 

 Hypothesis/' 20 In this he supports the despised Lamarck- 



19 Lovejoy, A. O., "The Argument for Organic Evolution before the "Origin 

 of Species," Popular Science Monthly, Nov., 1909. 



20 In this article, which was published in a newspaper, called the Leader, 

 March 20th, 1852, Spencer writes as follows: "Those who cavalierly reject the 

 Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to 

 forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority 

 of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of 

 any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none. Here we find, 

 scattered over the globe, vegetable and animal organisms numbering, of the 

 one kind (according to Humboldt) some 320,000 species, and of the other, some 

 2,000,000 species (see Carpenter); and if to these we add the numbers of animal 

 and vegetable species that have become extinct, we may safely estimate the 

 number of species that have existed, and are existing, on the earth, at not less 

 than ten millions. Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten 

 millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of 

 special creations? Or is it most likely that by continual modifications, due to 



