( 859 ) 



EDITORIAL GLEANINGS. 



South Africa is advancing outside the dreams of millionaires. 

 In the ' Transvaal Weekly Illustrated,' just to hand, we have a report 

 of Prof. Thomson's lecture on " What we Owe to Darwin," before a 

 congested and crowded audience at Johannesburg, in the Assembly 

 Hall of the Transvaal University College, and with the Anglican 

 Bishop of Pretoria as Chairman. The following extracts are typical 

 of the Address : — 



" The evolution idea was known to Greek philosophers ; it came 

 from Aristotle to Hume and Kant ; it linked Lucretius to Goethe. 

 It was made more actual by pioneers of modern biology such as 

 Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, and others, and became current 

 intellectual coin when Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, Her- 

 bert Spencer, Huxley, and Haeckel won the conviction of most 

 thoughtful men. It showed how each stage of life was linked to 

 the one before, back and back, until all was lost in the thick mists of 

 life's beginnings. In dealing with the evidence he claimed that all 

 facts known were evidences of evolution, and that just as the Whale 

 had rows of teeth that never came through and beneath feet of 

 blubber concealed a hind-leg, so man was a perfect collection of 

 relics, like the buttons and tabs on his garments, which had long 

 ceased to have any functional use, but had a highly interesting 

 history. An instance of this survival was the word Leopard, the 

 ' o ' in which was no longer sounded, but which served to remind us 

 that the ancients believed that animal to be a cross between the 

 'Leo' and the 'Pard.' 



" Darwin was the liberator of human intelligence. The ' Origin 

 of Species ' had been called the Magna Charta of intellect. It freed 

 the intellect from the tyranny of dogma, attacking realms hitherto 

 considered inaccessible to science. It threw light, in a hopeful way, 

 upon man's nature, it gave new light to literature, even to theology ; 

 and it could lead us in the future to an almost undreamt-of control of 

 life. The evolution idea was now part of the intellectual inheritance 

 of every man. It had given the world a new outlook. Older than 



