130 CHARLES DARWIN. 



On page 468 he continues 



" ,But you must recollect that when I say I think it is either 

 Mr. Darwin's hypothesis or nothing ; that either we must take 

 his view, or look upon the whole of organic nature as an enigma, 

 the meaning of which is wholely hidden from us ; you must 

 understand that I mean that I accept ' it provisionally, in 

 exactly the same way as I accept any other hypothesis." 



He concludes the lectures and the volume in 

 which they are now reproduced by the following 

 eloquent testimony to the unique value of the 

 " Origin of Species " : 



" I believe that if you strip it of its theoretical part it still 

 remains one of the greatest encyclopaedias of biological doctrine 

 that any one man ever brought forth, and I believe that, if you 

 take it as the embodiment of an hypothesis, it is destined to 

 be the guide of biological and psychological speculation for the 

 next three or four generations." 



The next essay from which I quote was written 

 in 1871. At the beginning of " Mr. Darwin's Critics " 

 (" Darwiniana," p. 120) he uses words which, if they 

 stood alone, might be interpreted as an indication 

 of a stronger conviction. 



" Whatever may be thought or said about Mr. Darwin's 

 doctrines, or the manner in which he has propounded them, 

 this much is certain, that, in a dozen years, the 'Origin of 

 Species ' has worked as complete a revolution in biological 

 science as the ' Principia ' did in astronomy and it has done 

 so, because, in the words of Helmholtz, it contains an 'essen- 

 tially new creative thought.' " 



This last quotation, and the following one, from 

 "Evolution in Biology," written in 1878, are, 1 think, 



