Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/51

 48 books. "The Origin of Species" ran into many editions, and was translated into several languages. Darwin found himself a center of interest for the world, and his theory a cause of heated argument for all who cared to talk or write about it.

How revolutionary Darwin's work was, and how unwillingly he himself came to the conclusion that organic evolution was an undeniable truth, it is hard for us to understand. For most of us, some at least, of the essential facts of evolution are every-day knowledge; we look upon the anti-evolutionist as a strange anachronism—a hang-over from a past age. But in Darwin's day conditions were very different. Thus we find him, in a letter written in 1844 to the great botanist Hooker, saying:

"I have been … engaged in a very presumptuous work, and I know no one individual who would not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with the distribution of the Galapagos organisms, etc., and with the character of the American fossil mammifers, etc., that I determined to collect, blindly, every sort of fact, which could bear in any way on what are species. … At last, gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion that I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck