DARWIN'S CLAIM TO DESCENT. 201 



-Allen- could not help saying " in its crude form," but 

 descent with modification in 1 809 meant, to all intents 

 and purposes, and was understood to mean, what it 

 means now, or ought to mean, to most people.) " The 

 universal stir," says Mr. Allen on the following page, 

 "and deep prying into evolutionary questions which 

 everywhere existed among scientific men in his early 

 days was iiaturally' communicated to a lad "born of a 

 scientific family and inheriting directly in blood and 

 bone the biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus 

 Darwin." 



I confess to thinking that Mr. Allen's account of 

 the influences which surrounded Mr. Darwin's youth, 

 if tainted with picturesqueness, is still substantially 

 correct. On an earlier page he had written : — " It 

 is impossible to take up any scientific memoirs or 

 treatises of the first half of our own century without 

 seeing at a glance how every mind of high original 

 scientific importance was permeated and disturbed 

 by the fundamental questions aroused, but not fully 

 answered, by Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. 

 In Lyell's letters, and in Agassiz's lectures, in the 

 ' Botanic Journal ' and in the ' Philosophical Trans- 

 actions,' in treatises on Madeira beetles and the 

 Australian flora, we find everywhere the thoughts of 

 men profoundly influenced in a thousand directions by 

 this universal evolutionary solvent and leaven. 



" And while the world of thought was thus seething 

 and moving restlessly before the wave of ideas set 

 in motion by these various independent philosophers, 

 another group of causes ia another field was rendering- 



