ADDRESS. Ixxxvii 
He passes from the humble bee with its rude cells, through the Melipona 
with its more artistic cells, to the hive-bee with its astonishing architecture, 
The bees place themselves at equal distances apart upon the wax, sweep 
and excavate equal spheres round the selected points. The spheres intersect, 
and the planes of intersection are built up with thin lamine. Hexagonal 
cells are thus formed. This mode of treating such questions is, as I have 
said, representative. He habitually retires from the more perfect and com- 
plex, to the less perfect and simple, and carries you with him through 
stages of perfecting, adds increment to increment of infinitesimal change, 
and in this way gradually breaks down your reluctance to admit that the 
exquisite climax of the whole could be a result of natural selection. 
Mr. Darwin shirks no difficulty ; and, saturated as the subject was with his 
own thought, he must have known, better than his critics, the weakness as well 
as the strength of his theory. This of course would be of little avail were hir 
object a temporary dialectic victory instead of the establishment of a truth 
which he means to be everlasting. But he takes no pains to disguise the 
weakness he has discerned ; nay, he takes every pains to bring it into the 
strongest light. His vast resources enable him to cope with objections started 
by himself and others, so as to leave the final impression upon the reader’s mind 
that, if they be not completely answered, they certainly are not fatal. Their 
negative force being thus destroyed, youare free to be influenced by thevast posi- 
tive mass of evidence he is able to bring before you. This largeness of knowledge 
and readiness of resource render Mr. Darwin the most terrible of antagonists. 
Accomplished naturalists have levelled heavy and sustained criticisms against 
him—not always with the view of fairly weighing his theory, but with the 
express intention of exposing its weak points only. This does not irritate 
him. He treats every objection with a soberness and thoroughness which 
even Bishop Butler might be proud to imitate, surrounding each fact with 
its appropriate detail, placing it in its proper relations, and usually giving 
it a significance which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to appear. 
This is done without a trace of ill-temper. He moves over the subject 
with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the rocks 
is not always without a counterpart in the logical pulverization of the ob- 
jector. But though in handling this mighty theme all passion has been 
stilled, there is an emotion of the intellect incident to the discernment of new 
truth which often colours and warms the pages of Mr. Darwin. His success 
has been great; and this implies not only the solidity of his work, but the 
preparedness of the public mind for such a revelation. On this head a 
remark of Agassiz impressed me more than any thing else. Sprung from a 
race of theologians, this celebrated man combated to the last the theory of 
natural selection. Onc of the many times I had the pleasure of meeting him 
in the United States was at Mr. Winthrop’s beautiful residence at Brookline, 
near Boston. Rising from luncheon, we all halted as if by a common impulse 
in front of 2 window, and continued there a discussion which had been started 
at table. The maple was in its autumn glory; and the exquisite beauty of 
the scene outside seemed, in my case, to interpenetrate without disturbance 
the intellectual action. Earnestly, almost sadly, Agassiz turned, and said to 
the gentlemen standing round, “I confess that [ was not prepared to see this 
theory received as it has been by the best intellects of our time. Its success 
is greater than I could have thought possible.” 
In our day grand generalizations have been reached. The theory of the 
origin of species is but one of them, Another, of still wider grasp and more 
