LINNEAN 



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his kindness, much experience. He seemed to me never to forget a 

 plant that presented any feature of interest if lie had but once seen 

 it, and he could single out the specimen that he had examined from 

 a sheet full of duplicates. It was the same with books ; those of the 

 old authors especially, as Eay, Linnaeus, Kumph, and Ehede, they 

 were all familiar to him, and he could often turn to a volume, and 

 sometimes to a page, for a statement or figure without the aid 

 of a reference. Thus, at the age of twenty-eight, when he sailed 

 for Australia, it was as an accomplished botanist.' 



Professor Flower pronounced the eulogy on Charles Darwin, who, 

 he said, had special claims on their consideration, inasmuch as a 

 large and very important portion of his work was first communi- 

 cated to the world by means of papers read at their meetings and 

 published in their journal. His life and work, however, were so 

 familiar and had been exhaustively treated so recently that the task 

 assigned him could be discharged with a brevity which would be by 

 no means the measure of their appreciation. They were concerned 

 chiefly with those great characteristics of Darwin which dominated 

 all others and made him what he was — the consuming, irrepressible 

 longing to unravel the mysteries of living nature, to penetrate the 

 shroud which conceals the causes and methods by which all the 

 wonders and all the diversity, all the beauty, yea, and all the defor- 

 mity too, which we see around us in the life of animals and plants, 

 have been brought about. Against our ignorance on those subjects 

 his life was one long battle ; the work of others, by comparison, 

 was irregular guerilla warfare. His main victory was the destruc- 

 tion of the conception of species as being beyond certain narrow 

 limits fixed and unchangeable — a conviction which prevailed almost 

 universally before his time. It might be admitted that others had 

 prepared the way, and that the work was carried on simultaneously 

 by others who might have attained to the same conclusion ; but the 

 fact remained that he was the main agent in the conversion of 

 almost the whole scientific world from one conception to a totally 

 opposite conception of one of the most important operations of 

 nature. Such a revolution, with its momentous consequences on 

 the study of zoology and botany, was without a parallel in the his- 

 tory of science. This rapid conversion was much facilitated by 

 the fascinating nature of the theory of the operation of natural 

 selection in intensifying and fixing variation as originally pro- 

 pounded in the rooms of the Society independently and simul- 

 taneously by Darwin and by Wallace. The theory had been sub- 

 jected to keen criticism, and difficulties had undoubtedly been 

 shown in accepting it as the complete explanation of many of the 

 phenomena of evolution. That other factors had been at work 

 besides natural selection in bringing about the present condition of 

 the organic world probably every one would now admit, as indeed 

 Darwin did himself. That, however, was not the occasion to 

 examine so complex a subject, and indeed the time seemed scarcely 

 yet to have come when it could be done with the necessary calm- 

 ness and impartiality. But Darwin's work and the controversies 

 that had gathered round it had proved a marvellous stimulus to 



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