326 Charles Darwin : a Farewell Offering. [June, 
nificant that the terms “ reform ” and “ destruction ” are 
becoming synonymous. Darwin, on the contrary, was not 
the “ reformer,” but the “ reformator ” of Biology. This 
character appears in his method of propagandism. He did 
not go about criticising and attacking the dogmas of the Old 
School, the doctrines of special mechanical creation from 
without, of the perfection of Nature of final causes in the 
animal and vegetable structure, and the like. Just as Bacon 
superseded the Aristotelian and Scholastic Philosophy, with- 
out deigning to enter into what might have been an endless 
and profitless logomachy, so Darwin spent little time in ex- 
posing the errors of the party then dominant. He did not 
seek to refute Agassiz, Cuvier, Paley, Linnaeus, Davy, and 
the like. His task was to affirm and to create. It is well 
also to note that the same character prevails in the doCtrines 
of the Evolutionist School. Cuvier and his disciples had 
held the creed of Catastrophism. According to them a great 
abrogation, “ reform,” or destruction took place every few 
thousand years, thus making tabulam rasam , and getting rid 
of the past with all its features and failings. This is the 
outcome of the negative, the “ anti ’’-spirit. But Darwin 
has shown us that the great changes of Nature are effected 
in a different manner. The old is not destroyed at hap- 
hazard. New forms gradually spring up, supersede it, and 
take its place. Here, then, we have the creative, the affirm- 
ative, the originating spirit. It would be instructive and far 
from difficult to show that Darwin’s style of controversy, if 
we may so call it, is at one with the doCtrines he upheld, 
and with the processes which we see working in the world 
around us. 
Need we therefore wonder if his researches and his 
writings were a stumbling-block and a stone of offence, alike 
to the bigoted adherents of the past and to the no less 
bigoted votaries of destructive changes ? 
Charles Darwin has been likened to the great man at j 
whose side he sleeps, and who perhaps may be regarded as 
his only fitting companion in death. Both these sages have 
done more, much more, than merely re-organise — or rather | 
create — some special science. Newton gave us in substance j 
the astronomy and the natural philosophy of the present 
day; but he convinced mankind of the immensity of the 
universe ;* he familiarised the world with the conception of 
unvarying “ law ” (I use the term reluctantly) ; he showed j 
* Completing the task which the great Italians, Galilei and Giordano Bruno, 
had begun. 
