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D ah win Fifty Years After. 



By De. David Stake Jordan. 



Scientific men, as a rule, do not pay much attention to birthdays ; but 

 certain anniversaries have been impressed upon our minds of late, and in 

 the last two years there have been many celebrations: The two hundredth 

 anniversay of Linnaeus, and the one hundred and fiftieth of his great work. 

 "Systema Naturae" ; the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Agassiz, 

 the greatest teacher of science ; the one hundredth anniversay of the birth- 

 day of Charles Darwin, and the fifth anniversary of the publication of 

 "The Origin of Species," the greatest landmark of the history of the nine- 

 teenth century. Twenty-five years ago we note another landmark of im- 

 port to us. It was then that Amos Butler brought his Brookville academy 

 to Indianapolis, where its first meeting was held on December 29, 1885. As 

 I was just then elected president of Indiana University, the youngest of 

 all the college presidents — and the greenest — being, therefore, by some 

 preferred to the drier article, I was made president. With this came the 

 suggestion that two others who, like myself, had fought each year on the 

 bloody sands of the educational arena of Indiana — John Coulter and Har- 

 vey Wiley — would be my successors. 



At that time the idea of evolution was in the air, the theory of descent, 

 that the forms now living were created, not by mysterious power, but by 

 the operation of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. It was 

 my fortune to have been brought up as a student of Agassiz, having heard 

 all his lectures on this subject, and inherited his prepossessions. It was 

 my own studies of animals which led me little by little to become an evo- 

 lutionist, and I have said that I went over to that view of the case about 

 as graciously and as willingly as a cat which a boy draws across the carpet 

 by its tail. 



I remember it was out at Broad Ripple, just north of this city, where 

 Copeland and myself first definitely decided that we were converts to Dar- 

 winism. The little sand darter in the river is a sort of perch, but differs 

 from any others in having very few scales, and these very thin ones. We 

 testified to our faith by an article in which we said that these little animals 

 are derived from the scaly perches; that we did not know whether it has 



