Williams : Darwin and Darwinism. 39 



The laws of heredity must be taken into account, and the laws of 

 Variation, which tend not only to reproduce the life of the parents, but 

 along with this, a tendency to vary and be unlike the parent type. 

 Now and then, some rare faculty, some new power, or sense, or organ, 

 is developed or enlarged this w^ay or that, which proves of advantage 

 in the world-wide struggle for life. Do you not see, then, how 

 naturally this type of life gains predominance 1 It is that which 

 survives, and which in its turn produces offspring, and controls the 

 future. 



Darwin discovered and verified this law of natural selection, or what 

 Herbert Spencer has called '' the survival of the fittest "; showing that 

 here was a power capable (only give it time enough) of producing the 

 wonderful results that we see in the various forms of vegetable, animal, 

 and human life around us. 



Only give it time enough, I say. Here was the difficulty. This was 

 the very thing that so long stood in the way of the world's progress in 

 this direction. The world had been shut up in the narrow confines of 

 six thousand years, and there was no room for any such process as 

 this. So long as it was a part not only of m_an's religion, but of 

 science, to believe the world had existed but six thousand years, any 

 such theory was simply nonsense, because the causes which he demon- 

 strated to be at work were utterly inadequate to produce such immense 

 results in so brief a period of time. 



But the study of the modern world was preparing the way for 

 Darwin. He came in the very fulness of time, when the world was 

 ripe for his thought. Geology had been at work, digging away at the 

 crust of the earth, and asking the old questions ; and just as by cutting 

 through a tree trunk and counting the circles you can tell its years, so 

 it was discovered that by digging away at the crust of the earth we 

 could read the records of the world, whose age was written by the 

 centuries themselves as they passed over it and left behind their foot- 

 marks. 



Prof. John Fiske, in a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly^ has 

 proved almost beyond question that man was living in Europe at least 

 two hundred and fifty thousand years ago ; and man is simply a 

 blossom on the summit of the trunk of the century plant. Man is a 

 parvenu of yesterday. Time, even so far as this world is concerned, 

 reaches back millions and millions of years. And life has been on 

 this old planet cycles and cycles of ages, creeping from the lowest 

 forms with feeble foot, until at last its crown and culmination — man — • 

 has appeared. The thing, then, that Darwin did was to discover and 



