. Darwin’s Claim to Descent 175 
and those who disbelieved in it, alike, were profoundly 
interested and agitated in soul by the far-reaching implica- 
tions of that fundamental problem. On every side 
evolutionism, in its crude form.” (I suppose Mr. Allen 
could not help saying “‘in its crude form,” but descent 
with modification in 1809 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 naturally 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 Transactions,’ 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 in another field was rendering smooth the path 
beforehand for the future champion of the amended evo- 
lutionism. Geology on the one hand and astronomy on 
the other were making men’s minds gradually familiar 
