COX ON THE FOUNDER OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY 245 
rehearse Darwin’s achievements as in the sincerity and cordiality with which 
they acknowledge the indebtedness of all branches of knowledge to his 
shaping and guiding influence. They contain repeated references to him as 
the Newton of the biological sciences and constantly acclaim him as the 
greatest of generalizes. They also attempt, in some measure, to explain 
the causes of his extraordinary success, and perhaps I can not do better 
than to bring this address to a close by quoting from the first essay in the 
book a few sentences which seem to me to epitomize the case more clearly 
than I can do in my own words. “How is it that Darwin succeeded where 
others had failed?” asks Professor J. Arthur Thomson. “Because,” 
he replies, “in the first place, he had clear visions — ‘pensees de la jeunesse, 
executees par l’age mur’—which a university curriculum had not made 
impossible, which the Beagle voyage made vivid, which an unrivalled 
British doggedness made real,— visions of the web of life, of the fountain of 
change within the organism, of the struggle for existence and its winnowing 
and of the spreading genealogical tree. Because, in the second place, he 
put so much grit into the verification of his visions, putting them to the proof 
in an argument which is of its kind — direct demonstration being out of the 
question — quite unequalled. Because, in the third place, he broke down 
the opposition which the most scientific had felt to the seductive modal 
formula of evolution by bringing forward a more plausible theory of the 
process than had been previously suggested.— Nor can one forget, since 
questions of this magnitude are human and not merely academic, that he 
wrote so that all men could understand. 
“To sum up: the idea of organic evolution, older than Aristotle, slowly 
developed from the stage of suggestion to the stage of verification, and the 
first convincing verification was Darwin’s; from being an a priori anticipa¬ 
tion it has become an interpretation of nature, and Darwin is still the chief 
interpreter; from being a modal interpretation it has advanced to the rank 
of a causal theory, the most convincing part of which men will never cease 
to call Darwinism.” 
