EVOLUTION 31 



EVOLUTION 



Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like cloo- 

 tricity, the cholera ^ci'm, woman's rights, the great mining 

 boom, and the Eastern Question, it is • in the air.' It per- 

 vades society everywliere with its sul)tle essence ; it infects 

 small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its slang phrases ; 

 it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant Pliilis- 

 tinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody 

 believes he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in 

 his everyday conversation as he discusses the points of race- 

 horses he has never seen, the charms of peeresses ho has 

 never spoken to, and the demerits of authors he has never 

 read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous semi- 

 conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. 

 Darwin, and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer — 

 don't you know ? — and a lot more of those scientific fellows. 

 It is generally understood in the best-infonned circles that 

 evolutionism consists for the most part in a belief about 

 nature at large essentially similar to that applied by Topsy 

 to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in 

 short, that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known 

 that in the opinion of the evolutionists as a body we are 

 all of us ultimately descended from men with tails, who 

 were the final offspring and improved edition of the common 

 gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception 

 of the various points in the great modern evolutionary 

 programme. 



