THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IX BIOLOGY 



ings of the doctrine of natural selection. Soon it was 

 seen that should the doctrine of the survival of the 

 favored races through the struggle for existence 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 conservative majority of 

 mankind recoiled from this necessity with horror. And 

 this conservative majority included 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 ef- 

 fort ridiculous, and the vaporings of the Vestiges alto- 

 gether 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 



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