3i6 



NA TURE 



[September 9, 1909 



^ny other man has ever altered them, and this, not only 

 in the subjects he made his own, but in every department 

 of human knowledge and thought. 



Being as I am a member of Charles Darwin's own 

 college, coming as I do straight from the celebration in 

 which the whole world united to do his memory honour, 

 it would seem meet that I should in this year of the cen- 

 tenary of his birth devote this address to a consideration 

 of his life and of his work, and of such confirmation and 

 modification of his theories as the work ol the last fifty 

 years has revealed. 



As to the man, I can but quote two estimates of his 

 character, one by a college companion who lived on terms 

 of close intimacy with Darwin when at Christ's, the other 

 the considered judgment of one who knew and loved and 

 fought for Darwin in later life. 



Mr. Herbert says : — 



" It would be idle for me to speak of his vast intel- 

 lectual powers . . . but I cannot end this cursory and 

 rambling sketch without testifying, and I doubt not all 

 his surviving college friends would concur with me, that 

 he was the most genial, warm-hearted, generous, and 

 -affectionate of friends ; that his sympathies were with all 

 that was good and true ; and that he had a cordial hatred 

 for everything false, or vile, or cruel, or mean, or dis- 

 honourable. He was not only great, but preeminently 

 good, and just, and lovable." 



Prof. Huxley, speaking of his name, says : — 



" They think of him who bore it as a rare combination 

 of genius, industry, and unswerving veracity, who earned 

 his place among the most famous men of the age by sheer 

 native power, in the teeth of a gale of popular prejudice, 

 and uncheered by a sign of favour or appreciation from 

 the official fountains of honoar ; as one who, in spite of 

 an acute sensitiveness to praise and blame, and notwith- 

 standing provocations which might have e.xcused any out- 

 break, kept himself clear of all envy, hatred, malice, nor 

 dealt otherwise than fairly and justly with the unfairness 

 and injustice which was showered upon him ; while, to the 

 end of his days, he was ready to listen with patience and 

 respect to the most insignificant of reasonable objectors."' 



It has been somewhat shallowly said — said, in fact, on 

 the day of the centenary of Darwin's birth — that " we are 

 upon very unsafe ground when we speculate upon the 

 manner in which organic evolution has proceeded without 

 knowing in the least what was the variable organic basis 

 from which the whole process started." Such statements 

 show a certain misconception, not confined to the layman, 

 as to the scope and limitations of scientific theories in 

 general, and to the theory of organic evolution in par- 

 ticular. The idea that it is fruitless to speculate about 

 the evolution of species without determining the origin of 

 life is based on an erroneous conception of the true nature 

 of scientific thought and of the methods of scientific pro- 

 cedure. For science the world of natural phenomena is .1 

 complex of procedure going on in time, and the sole func- 

 tion of natural science is to construct systematic schemes 

 forming conceptual descriptions of actually observed pro- 

 cesses. .Of ultimate origins natural science has no know- 

 ledge and can give no account. The question whether 

 living matter is continuous or not with what we call non- 

 living matter is certainly one to which an attempted answer 

 falls within the scope of scientific method. If, however, 

 the final answer should be in the affirmative, we should 

 then know that all matter is living ; but we should he no 

 nearer to the attainment of a notion of the origin of life. 

 No body of scientific doctrine succeeds in describing in 

 terms of lavifs of succession more than some limited set 

 of stages of a natural process ; the whole process — if, 

 indeed, it can be regarded as a whole — must for ever be 

 beyond the reach of scientific grasp. The earliest stage 

 to which science has succeeded in tracing back any part 

 of a sequence of phenomena constitutes a new problem for 

 science, and that without end. There is always an earlier 

 stage, and to an earliest we can never attain. The ques- 

 tions of origins concern the theoloc'ian, the metaphysician, 

 perhans the poet. The fact that Darwin did not concern 

 himself with auestions as to the orisin of life nor with 

 1he apparent discontinuity between living and non-living 

 ■Riatter in no w.av diminishes the value of his work. The 

 ' "Life and Letter's of Charle? Darwin," vol. ii.,i8S7, p. 179. 

 NO. 2080, VOL. 81] 



broad, pliilosophic mind of the great master of inductive 

 method saw too fully the nature of the task he had set 

 before him to hamper himself with irrelevant views as to 

 origins. 



No well-instructed person imagines that Darwin spoke 

 either the first or the last word about organic evolution. 

 His ideas as to the precise mode of evolution may be, and 

 are being, modified as time goes on. This is the fate "if 

 all scientific theories ; none are stationary, none are fina.. 

 The development of science is a continuous process of 

 evolution, like the world of phenomena itself. It has, 

 however, some few landmarks which stand out exceptional 

 and prominent. None of these is greater or will be more 

 enduring in the history of thought than the one associated 

 with the name of Charles Darwin. 



I cannot, indeed, attempt to weigh or estimate the 

 influence and the far-reaching import of the work which 

 all the world has been weighing and estimating during 

 this year, the centenary of his birth and the jubilee of the 

 ■■ Origin of Species." I cannot, to my intense regret, 

 give you any personal recollections of Darwin, for though 

 I think I once saw him in the streets of Cambridge, I 

 have to my sorrow never been absolutely sure that this 

 was so. 



But in reading his writings and his son's most admirable 

 Life, one attains a very vivid impression of the man. One 

 of his dominant characteristics was simplicity — simplicity 

 and directness. In his style he was terse, but he managed 

 to write so that even the most abstruse problems became 

 clear to the public. The fascination of the story he had 

 to tell was enhanced by the direct way he told it. 



One more characteristic. Darwin's views excited at the 

 time intense opposition and in many quarters intense 

 hatred. They were criticised from every point of view, and 

 seldom has a writer been more violently attacked and 

 abused. Now what seemed to me so wonderful in Darwin 

 was that — at any rate so far .as we can know — he took 

 both criticism and abuse with mild serenity. What he 

 wanted to do was to find the truth, and he carefully con- 

 sidered any criticism, and if it helped him to his goal 

 he thanked the critic and used his new facts. He never 

 wasted time in replying to those who fulminated against 

 him ; he passed them by and went on vifith his search. 



In the development of the theories associated with 

 Darwin's work the New World played a prominent part. 

 Darwin's " Wanderjahre " were spent on this side of the 

 Atlantic. The central doctrine of evolution through 

 natural selection was forced upon his mind by the studies 

 and researches he made in South America during the 

 voyage of the Beagle. The numerous observations in all 

 departments of natural science and the varied forms of 

 life he came across in this classical journey were the 

 bricks with which he built many of his later theories. 

 The storm of controversy which the " Origin of Species " 

 awoke was at least as violent in America as in Great 

 Britain, and we must not forget the parts played by men 

 like Hyatt, Fiske, Osborn, and many others, and above 

 all by Asa Gray and by Brooks of Baltimore, whose recent 

 death has robbed America of perhaps her greatest 

 Darwinian. 



It is a somewhat remarkable fact that whilst the works 

 of Darwin stimulated an immense amount of research in 

 biology, this research did not at first take the line he 

 himself had traced. With some exception the leading 

 zoological work of the end of the last century took the 

 form of embryology, morphology, and paleeontology, and 

 such subjects as cell-lineage, " Entwickelungsmechanik " ; 

 the minute structure of protoplasm, life-histories, tera- 

 tology, have occupied the minds of those who interest 

 themselves in the problems of life. Along all these lines 

 of research man has been seeking for the solution of that 

 secret of nature which at the bottom of his heart he knows 

 he will never find, and yet the pursuit of which is his 

 one abiding interest. Had Frank Balfour lived we should, 

 I think, have sooner returned to the broader lines of re- 

 search as practised by Darwin, for it was his intention 

 to turn himself to the physiology — using the term in its 

 widest sense — of the lower animals. Towards the end of 

 the nineteenth century, stimulated by Galton, Weldon 

 began those series of measurements and observations which 

 have culminated in the establishment, under the guidance 



