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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLIII 



cient minuteness in the subdivision of science. Looking 

 back on his career, it is not difficult to see that the geo- 

 logical problems opened up to him by the voyage of the 

 ' 'Beagle" would have afforded an interesting field for 

 detailed life work in geology which would have placed 

 him quickly among the foremost geologists of his day 

 if he had devoted himself to them and continued to pub- 

 lish on that subject and for those specialists. Even the 

 French savants saw in his barnacle studies the work of 

 far more than a tyro; but he did not choose to devote 

 himself to the morphology and classification of animals. 

 So little had he been thought of generally as knowing 

 anything of botany, that the Gardeners' Chronicle re- 

 viewer of his orchid book expressed himself as doubly 

 const rained to care in critically analyzing it. He was 

 somewhat like a versatile witness questioned individually 

 by the members of a polyglot jury, each using and under- 

 standing his own language and getting nothing more than 

 a minute fragment of the whole testimony: he can hardly 

 be said to have had a hearing before his peers— of whom 

 it would have been hard, even, to draw a full panel at 

 any time in the world's history. 



Darwin was really a philosopher. His son speaks of 

 him as seeming to be so charged with a theorizing power 

 that, no fact, however small, could avoid releasing a 

 stream of theory which itself magnified the fact in im- 

 portance ; but just enough to his theories not to condemn 

 them unheard, so that he was willing to test what would 

 seem to most people not at all worth testing. This is at 

 once the key note to his life work and his greatness in 

 influencing human thought. Though his philosophy has 

 received unusual, and perhaps undue, attention, through 

 clashing with some of what had become incorporated in 

 the theology of his day, his service in molding our way 

 of seeing nature may be coordinated with that of the 

 great men who have reduced the movements of the 

 planets to a physical basis and the transmutations of 

 matter to terms of chemistry. 



