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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. I. No. 8. 



the dinornis and other gigantic birds had 

 disappeared. But he never, so far as can be 

 ascertained, expressed a definite opinion on 

 Darwinism." 



It is well enough at this day, when the 

 scientific woi'ld is of one mind as regards 

 the ti'uth of the evolution theory, to ascribe 

 indifference and even 'hostility' to Owen, 

 but we fail to see that this is quite just. 

 For Owen, so far from attacking or mini- 

 mizing the new plan of evolution invoked by 

 Darwin, was even said by the editor of the 

 'London Review,' as Darwin tells us, in his 

 own words, to have ' promulgated the theory 

 of natural selection before I had done so.' 



So strong a Darwinian as the acute and 

 clear-headed Gray states, more fully and 

 satisfactorily perhaps than Darwin, the posi- 

 tion of Owen. In his ' Darwiniana ' Dr. 

 Asa Gray, who, writing in 1860, frankly 

 confesses : " We are not disposed nor pre- 

 pared to take sides for or against the new 

 hypothesis," and yet who by his own studies 

 and mental tendencies was ' not wholly un- 

 prepared for it,' thus humorously refers to 

 Owen's views, published before the appear- 

 ance of Darwin's book, " Now and then we 

 encountered a sentence, like Prof. Owen's 

 ' axiom of the continuous operation of the 

 ordained becoming of living things,' which 

 haunted us like an apparition. For, dim as 

 our conception must needs be as to what 

 such oracular and grandiloquent phrases 

 might really mean, we feel confident that 

 they presaged no good to old beliefs " (p. 

 88). Further on he writes : " Owen him- 

 self is apparently in travail with some trans- 

 mutation theory of his own conceiving, 

 which may yet see the light, although Dar- 

 win's came first to the birth In- 

 deed to turn the point of a pungent simile 

 directed against Darwin — the difference be- 

 tween the Darwinian and the Owenian hypo- 

 theses may, after all, be only that between 

 homoeopathic and heroic doses of the same 

 drug " (p. 102). Again, in 1873, he writes : 



" Owen still earlier signified his adhesion to 

 the doctrine of derivation in some form, buj; 

 apparently upon general, speculative 

 grounds; for he repudiated natural selection, 

 and offered no other natural solution of the 

 mystery of the orderly incoming of cognate 

 forms." 



Finally we maj' quote from a letter of 

 Darwin's (Life ii. p. 388), written in 1862 

 to Sir Charles Lyell : "I was assured 

 that Owen in his lectures this spring a,d- 

 vanced as a new idea that wingless birds had 

 lost their wings by disuse, also that mag- 

 pies stole spoons, &c., from a remnant of 

 some instinct like that of the Bower bird, 

 which ornaments its plajdng passage with 

 pretty feathers. Indeed, I am told that he 

 liinted plainly that all birds are descended 

 from one." 



From all that has been said it would seem 

 to follow, from a perusal of these scattered 

 fragments, that Owen was an evolutionist 

 somewhat of the Lamarckian school; that 

 he was not a Darwinian as such, not being 

 fully persuaded of the adequacy of natural 

 selection as the sole cause of all evolution. 

 To this class certainly belong some natural- 

 ists and philosophers of the present day. 

 But it should be added that Owen, in the 

 latter part of his life, did not use the hy- 

 pothesis or theory as a working one, as did 

 some of the elder naturalists of his own 

 period, asLj^ell, Wjanan, Leidy, etc. He 

 was fifty-five years old when the 'Origui of 

 Species' appeared, and either was not then 

 prone to speculation, or had little leisure 

 for it. 



It must be granted that Owen, clear- 

 headed and sagacious as he was, did not rise 

 to the plane of that high qualitj^ of genius 

 which opens up new lines of investiga- 

 tion. His was not an epoch-making mind 

 of the quality of Lamarck or Darwin, in 

 the field of evolution, nor of Miiller, Von 

 Baer, Eathke, and Huxley, the founders of 

 modern morphology; nor of Koelliker or 



