EVOLUTION 49 



of the trireme, the ' Great Harry,' the ' Victory,'and the ' Mi- 

 notaur ' from the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity. 

 The grand conception of the uniform origin and develop- 

 ment of all things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us 

 in the one word evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles 

 Darwin nor to any other single thinker. It is the joint pro- 

 duct of innumerable woi-kcrs, all working up, though some of 

 them unconsciously, towards a grand final unified philo- 

 sophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the 

 Herschels ; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies ; 

 in biology, Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and 

 Spencer ; in psychology, Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and 

 Ribot ; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor, Lubbock, and De 

 Mortillet— these have been the chief evolutionary teachers 

 and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, 

 and the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as 

 a system of philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we 

 owe to one man alone — Herbert Spencer. Many other minds 

 — from Galileo and Copernicus, from Kepler and Newton, 

 from Linnreus and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and 

 Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius 

 — had been piling together the vast collection of raw 

 material from which that great and stately superstructure 

 was to be finally edified. But the architect who placed each 

 block in its proper niche, who planned and designed the 

 whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the 

 rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, 

 was the author of the ' System of Synthetic Philosophy/ 

 and none other. It is a strange proof of how little people 

 know about their own ideas, that among tjie thousands who 

 talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent, are pro- 

 bably aware that both word and conception are alike due to 

 the commanding intelligence and vast generalising power 

 of Herbert Spencer. 



