DARWIN'S THEORY 55 



Thomas Huxley, who called himself "Darwin's bull- 

 dog," had much to do with giving it that place. 



Darwinism still retains strong support among scien- 

 tists. I do not mean that it has undergone no modi- 

 fication. Pure Darwinism has been abandoned by a 

 majority of leading scientists, who acknowledge that 

 natural selection was given too large a place among 

 the factors of natural evolution by Darwin, and that 

 the positive causation of variation and of the origin of 

 species must be elsewhere discovered. The work of 

 natural selection is acknowledged to be the elimina- 

 tion of species unfit to survive, rather than the causa- 

 tion of species. There is no warrant, however, for the 

 contention embodied in the title of a recent work by 

 Dr. E. Dinnert — At the Death-bed of Darwinism. And 

 it should be remembered that the general theory of 

 evolution of species by natural descent does not depend 

 for its truth upon the correctness of Darwin's explana- 

 tion of it. That explanation by its plausibiHty did 

 indeed gain for the theory of natural evolution its first 

 general acceptance by physical scientists; but the inves- 

 tigations which have followed have had the result of 

 confirming such acceptance independently of their 

 effect upon pure Darwinism. 



What precisely is the Darwinian theory ? Its author 

 describes it briefly in the following terms. After stating 

 his belief in the general theory of evolution, "that 

 species have been modified, during a long course of 

 descent," he adds, "This has been effected chiefly 

 through the natural selection of numerous successive, 



