THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



ation held the day, apparently unchallenged and unop- 

 posed. 



IV 



But even at this time the fancied security of the spe- 

 cial-creation hypothesis was by no means real. Though 

 it seemed so invincible, its real position was that of an 

 apparently impregnable fortress beneath which, all un- 

 beknown to the garrison, a powder-mine has been dug 

 and lies ready for explosion. For already there existed 

 in the secluded work-room of an English naturalist, a 

 manuscript volume and a portfolio of notes which might 

 have sufficed, if given publicity, to shatter the entire 

 structure of the special-creation hypothesis. The natu- 

 ralist who, by dint of long and patient effort, had con- 

 structed this powder-mine of facts was Charles Robert 

 Darwin, grandson of the author of Zoonomia. 



As long ago as July 1, 1837, young Darwin, then 

 twenty-eight years of age, had opened a private jour- 

 nal, in which he purposed to record all facts that 

 came to him which seemed to have any bearing on 

 the moot point of the doctrine of transmutation of spe- 

 cies. Four or five years earlier, during the course of 

 that famous trip around the world with Admiral Fitz- 

 roy, as naturalist to the Beagle, Darwin had made the 

 personal observations which first tended to shake his be- 

 lief in the fixity of species. In South America, in the 

 Pampean formation, he had discovered "great fossil an- 

 imals covered with armor like that on the existing arma- 

 dillos," and had been struck with this similarity of type 

 between ancient and existing faunas of the same region. 

 He was also greatly impressed by the manner in which 

 closely related species of animals were observed to re- 



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