COX ON THE FOUNDER OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY 231 
truly an epoch-making work. It instantly commanded respect and de¬ 
manded attention. Coming, however, as I have shown, without having 
had its way prepared for it, it was not to be expected that it would immedi¬ 
ately secure general acceptance. Even men of trained intellect pronounced 
it a difficult book to digest, but as fast as competent critics mastered its 
significance it conquered the judgment and compelled assent as no other 
work of scientific philosophy has ever done. Its influence has been cumula¬ 
tive down to our own day, and, although it is not read as much as it was 
twenty or thirty years ago and is even believed by a few to be out of date as 
a guide to investigation and thought, its spirit permeates all scientific work 
of any value, and the trails it blazed across the barren wastes of ignorance 
have become the broad roads of modern research. Some who are fortunate 
enough to have opened up side paths of investigation are wont to forget their 
obligation to the pioneer work which made possible the highway of wisdom 
from which they have diverged in pursuit of their specialities, but the broad¬ 
minded historian of science can never fail to accord to Darwin the credit 
due him as an explorer and discoverer in regions previously inaccessible and 
incognita. 
I have no wish to belittle the work of Lamarck. His Avas one of the 
courageous voyages out onto the sea of speculation which whetted men’s 
appetite for a larger and completer expedition into the region of the unknown. 
Lamarck touched upon some of the outlying islands of the new world of 
knowledge, but Darwin penetrated into the interior and brought back a map 
upon which investigators are still obliged to rely. To drop metaphor, 
Lamarck’s methods Avere somewhat academic and almost purely deductive 
and were therefore unsatisfactory to the strictly logical mind. Moreover, 
as has been said by Professor Osborn , 1 his “crude illustrations certainly 
could not predispose his contemporaries in favor of his theory.” Darwin, 
on the other hand, according to John Stuart Mill, employed reasoning Avhieh 
Avas “in the most exact accordance Avith strict principles of logic,” and he 
supported his theory by an appeal to a vast array of facts Avhieh it connected 
and explained. Danvin’s argument as a Avhole Avas clear-cut and focused 
upon a coherent line of thought, Avhile Lamarck’s was often faltering and 
inconsistent. It is hard to decide, for instance, whether Lamarck believed 
that the evolutionary process was dependent entirely upon the operation 
of natural Lavs, or that there was occasional supernatural intervention by a 
creational and directive power, or that the Creator merely started the uni¬ 
verse with a set of general principles and then left it, like Babbage’s “calcu¬ 
lating engine,” to turn out its OAvn progressions . 2 It is possible, however. 
1 Op. cit. p. 170. 
2 See ‘‘The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise,” 2d ed., Chap. VIII. 1S38. 
