432 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



It may without exaggeration be said that no scientific man, 

 certainly no naturalist, ever made an impression at once so 

 deep, so wide, and so immediate. The name of Linnaeus 

 might suggest comparison ; but readers and pupils of Linnaeus 

 over a century ago were to those of Darwin as tens are to 

 thousands, and the scientific as well as the popular interest of 

 the subjects considered were somewhat in the same ratio. 

 Humboldt, who, like Darwin, began with research in travel, 

 and to whom the longest of lives, vigorous health, and the 

 best opportunities were allotted, essayed similar themes in a 

 more ambitious spirit, enjoyed equal or greater renown, but 

 made no deep impression upon the thought of his own day or 

 of ours. As one criterion of celebrity, it may be noted that 

 no other author we know of ever gave rise in his own active 

 lifetime to a special department of bibliography. Dante-liter- 

 ature and Shakespeare-literature are the growth of centuries ; 

 but Darwinismus had filled shelves and alcoves and teeming 

 catalogues while the unremitting author was still supplying 

 new and ever novel subjects for comment. The technical 

 term which he chose for a designation of his theory, and sev- 

 eral of the phrases oi-iginated in explanation of it only twenty- 

 five years ago, have already been engrafted into his mother 

 tongue, and even into other languages, and are turned to use 

 in common as well as in philosophical discourse, without sense 

 of strangeness. 



Wonderful indeed is the difference between the reception 

 accorded to Darwin and that met with by his predecessor, 

 Lamarck. But a good deal has happened since Lamarck's 

 day ; wide fields of evidence were open to Darwin which were 

 wholly unknown to his forerunner ; and the time had come 

 when the subject of the origin and connection of living forms 

 could be taken up as a research rather than as a speculation. 

 Philosophizers on evolution have not been rare ; but Darwin 

 was not one of them. He was a scientific investigator, — a 

 philosopher, if you please, but one of the type of Galileo. 

 Indeed very much what Galileo was to physical science in his 

 time, Darwin is to biological science in ours. This without 

 reference to the fact that the writings of both conflicted with 



