88 Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights 
But apart from the invention of this reasonable hypothesis, which 
may well, as Huxley estimated, “be the guide of biological and 
psychological speculation for the next three or four generations,” 
Darwin made a more significant and imperishable contribution. Not 
for a few generations, but through all ages he should be remem- 
bered as the first who showed clearly that the problems of Heredity 
and Variation are soluble by observation, and laid down the course 
by which we must proceed to their solution!. The moment of in- 
spiration did not come with the reading of Malthus, but with the 
opening of the “first note-book on Transmutation of Species.” Evolu- 
tion is a process of Variation and Heredity. The older writers, 
though they had some vague idea that it must be so, did not study 
Variation and Heredity. Darwin did, and so begat not a theory, but 
a science. 
The extent to which this is true, the scientific world is only be- 
ginning to realise. So little was the fact appreciated in Darwin's 
own time that the success of his writings was followed by an almost 
total cessation of work in that special field. Of the causes which 
led to this remarkable consequence I have spoken elsewhere. They 
proceeded from circumstances peculiar to the time; but whatever 
the causes there is no doubt that this statement of the result is 
historically exact, and those who make it their business to collect 
facts elucidating the physiology of Heredity and Variation are well 
aware that they will find little to reward their quest in the leading 
scientific Journals of the Darwinian epoch. 
In those thirty years the original stock of evidence current and 
in circulation even underwent a process of attrition. As in the story 
of the Eastern sage who first wrote the collected learning of the 
universe for his sons in a thousand volumes, and by successive com- 
pression and burning reduced them to one, and from this by further 
burning distilled the single ejaculation of the Faith, “There is no 
god but God and Mohamed is the Prophet of God,” which was all his 
maturer wisdom deemed essential :—so in the books of that period do 
we find the corpus of genetic knowledge dwindle to a few prerogative 
oe and these at last to the brief formula of an unquestioned 
cree 
1 Whatever be our estimate of the importance of Natural Selection, in this we all agree. 
Samuel Butler, the most brilliant, and by far the most interesting of Darwin’s 
opponents—whose works are at length emerging from oblivion—in his Preface (1882) to 
the 2nd edition of Evolution, Old and New, repeats his earlier expression of homage to 
one whom he had come to regard as an enemy: ‘‘To the end of time, if the question be 
asked, “Who taught people to believe in Evolution?’ the answer must be that it was 
Mr. Darwin. This is true, and it is hard to see what palm of higher praise can be 
awarded to any philosopher.” 
® Life and Letters, 1. pp. 276 and 83. 
