50 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



Church, the Savilian professor in orthodox Oxford, the Rev. Baden 

 Powell, in 1855, had considered the "Philosophy of Creation" in 

 a " masterly manner," and Darwin bore testimony that nothing can 

 be more striking than the manner in which the enlightened priest 

 showed that the introduction of new species is a regular phenom- 

 enon in contradistinction to a miraculous process. Darwin was not 

 the first even to conceive of the principle of natural selection. 

 An American resident in England, Dr. W. C. Wells, as early as 

 181 3, had recognized the operation of the principle in the distri- 

 bution of the human race. In 1831, Patrick Matthews also appre- 

 ciated the principle of natural selection ; so Darwin himself wit- 

 nesses. 



It was not, then, the mere enunciation of the theory of evo- 

 lution, nor of the principle of natural selection, that characterized 

 the "Origin of Species," and drew the attention of mankind to it. 

 It was the recognition of the incessant and universal operation of 

 the factors, the masterly co-ordination of the facts of biology — zool- 

 ogy, botany, anatomy, general morphology, physiology, embryology, 

 palaeontology — and geology, the marshalling in orderly array and 

 concentration in one direction of all natural knowledge, the force of 

 the logic, the clearness of the exposition, the judicial candor of the 

 argument that arrested men's attention, and provoked serious con- 

 sideration of what before had been ignored as being beyond the 

 domain or possibilities of investigation. In the time of Lamarck 

 the world was not ready for a consideration of the question. Lam- 

 arck's was the prophesy of intuitive genius — genius the greater in 

 that the facts that had then been garnered were few. The " Vestiges 

 of Creation ' ' was so replete with errors of fact and misconceptions 

 as to attract more attention to the fault of its details that to the 

 logic of its argument. The principle of natural selection had been 

 applied to very special fields by Wells and Matthews ; no evidence 

 had been furnished of its wide extension, and it even occupied a 

 subordinate position in the thoughts of those investigators. 



The author of the " Origin of Species" was a different man from 



