X THE DARWIN CENTENARY. [April 23, 



conclusion which we may carry away? There must be some 

 problem more perplexing than we knew of." But in meditating 

 upon the matter one perceived that the scientific world had been 

 slowly moving up to the threshold, and was pausing at the threshold, 

 of some great discovery. Some solution must be at hand, but 

 nobody knew — nobody at least, outside of a very small circle — how 

 near the solution was or what it was going to be. We left the 

 lecture room, excited, perplexed, recognizing difficulties that we had 

 never known of before, and wondering what the outcome was going 

 to be. Five or six years later the " Origin of Species " appeared, 

 and the impression which it produced was enormous. No book 

 dealing with a scientific subject had ever, I suppose, been so largely 

 read by people who were not scientific. I was an undergraduate at 

 Oxford at the time, and I recollect very well that many of my 

 fellow undergraduates who never opened — I will not say a scientific, 

 but hardly even a serious book before — procured the treatise and 

 read it with avidity. We all talked about it. We discussed it with 

 the greatest ardor, indeed, with a positiveness which was in inverse 

 ratio to our knowledge ; and it was the same all over England. 

 " The Origin " was not only the subject of constant comment in 

 magazines and newspapers as well as at meetings of scientific socie- 

 ties, but it furnished a theme for constant jests in the comic papers, 

 and it was an unfailing topic for conversation in all cultivated 

 private houses. There was, of course, a good deal of alarm created 

 by it. The alarm was perhaps not quite as great as some people 

 have since represented. In England we had long been occupied 

 by what was called the " conflict between theology and geology," so 

 the new doctrine in its bearings on the Scriptural account of the 

 creation did not find us altogether unprepared. There had been a 

 good many scientific geologists, who were also religious men, some, 

 like Dean Buckland and dear old Professor Sedgwick, of Cambridge, 

 some of them clergymen, and who had continually said there could 

 not be any conflict between science and religion. But still, apart 

 from the more educated persons and those whom they influenced, 

 there was in many circles, particularly, of course, in the ecclesiastical 

 circles, a good deal of alarm and a great deal of somewhat heated dis- 

 cussion. Some hard words were said even about Mr. Darwin himself. 



