67 
author, except as regards this new name, he has no doubt 
furnished the theory. But, at any rate, his grandfather, Dr. 
Darwin, preceded him ; as did also Lamarck and Monboddo, 
to mention no other more ancient but less-known names, 
who have held the same views as regards all essential results, 
though they failed to give precisely his explanations of how 
the results were brought about. In the notorious anonymous 
volume, The Vestiges of Creation , we had essential Darwinism 
put forward most confidently, without Mr. Darwin's carefully 
selected and ingeniously varied and modified explanations ; 
which have since been developed, in support, however, we must 
always remember, of conclusions arrived at previously. But 
Dr. Louis Buchner, in his Kraft und Stoff, distinctly claims to 
have put forward views identical with those of Mr. Darwin 
seven years before The Origin of Species by Natural Selection 
was published, though he recognizes the value of the “ most 
convincing proofs " which he says Mr. Darwin has furnished 
in support of those views. (Force and Matter , p. 91, note.) 
Well, we have a very close analogy to this in the history 
of universal gravitation. On a recent occasion, when Dr. 
Gladstone read a paper here, I pointed out, by citations 
from the Philosophical Transactions , that both Hook and Halley 
had preceded Newton by ten or twelve years in starting the 
identical theory, though neither of them produced a Principia 
in order to establish it on mathematical principles.* That is, of 
course, Newton's great merit ; just as the natural -selection ex- 
planations of Mr. Darwin are his. I ought, perhaps, to add that 
even Kepler is said to have also had some idea of the same 
kind as Newton, as to the influence of the sun in regulating 
the motions of the planets ; but in truth Kepler's idea was 
not the same. He considered the sun had merely a directive 
influence, and not a force of attraction, as is explained in 
Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences. (Vol. ii. p. 19.) 
In that admirable volume we are also told of the remarkable 
manner in which the Principia of Newton was looked and 
longed for, and how it was at once accepted whenever it was 
published. How some believed in the theory, even before 
the book came out — just as some now do in Darwinism, while 
yet only expecting Mr. Darwin's coming treatise, which is to 
make all clear ! and how some — including even the acute 
philosopher Locke — believed in universal gravitation after 
the Principia was published, while acknowledging that they 
could not follow the steps of the reasoning by which it was 
mathematically established. I think it is very probable that 
* Journ. of Trans, of Viet. Inst., vol. i., p. 414. 
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