874 Address of A. R. Wallace at the Glasgow Meeting. 
to understand, what there was in the earlier discoveries that 
should have aroused such general opposition and been met 
with such universal incredulity. 
But the question of the mere “ Antiquity of Man” almost 
sank into insignificance at a very early period of the inquiry, 
in comparison with the far more momentuous and more excit- 
ing problem of the development of man from some lower ani- 
mal form, which the theories of Mr. Darwin and of Mr. Herbert 
Spencer soon showed: to be inseparably bound up with it This 
has been, and to some extent still is, the subject of fierce con- 
flict; but the controversy as to the fact of such development is 
now almost at an end, since one of the most talented represen- 
tatives of Catholic theology, and an anatomist of high standing 
—Professor Mivart—fully adopts it as regards physical struc: 
ture, reserving his opposition for those parts of his theory, 
which would deduce man’s whole intellectual and moral nature 
from the same source, and by a similar mode. of development 
Never, perhaps, in the whole history of science or philosophy 
has so great a revolution in thought and opinion been effected 
of publication of Mr. Darwin's “Origin of Species and “ 
scent of Man.” Up to the commencement of this period the 
belief in the independent creation or origin of the species 
animals and plants, and the very recent appearance of man 
upon the earth, were, practically, universal. Long : 
end of it these two beliefs had utterly disappeared, not only 75 
the scientific world, but almost equally so among the literary 
and educated classes generally. The belief in the independent 
origin of man held its ground somewhat longer, but the 
eation of Mr. Darwin's great work gave even 
blow, for hardly anyone capable of judging 
now doubts the derivative nature of man’s bodily stra 
one extreme to the other, from a profession (so few seer 
total ignorance as to the mode of origin of all living things 
to a claim to almost complete knowledge, of the whole prog ‘0 
of the universe, from the first speck of living protoplasm UP 
