Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/774

754 of this century broached the doctrine that there is in living beings a continuous series of gradations as well as a consistent and general plan of organization; and that the creation, therefore, or origin of the different forms of plants and animals must have been the result of a gradual process of development or of derivation one from another, the whole standing connected together in certain causal relations. But in Britain such views, though known and not altogether repulsive to a few, obtained little favor, and, by some strange process of reasoning, were looked upon by the great majority as little short of impious questionings of the supreme power of the Almighty.

"How different is the position of matters in this respect in our day!—when the cautious naturalist receives and adopts with the greatest reserve the statement of fixed and permanent specific characters as belonging to the different forms of organized beings, and is fully persuaded of the constant tendency to variation which all species show even in the present condition of the earth, and of the still greater liability to change which must have existed in the earlier periods of its formation—when the belief prevails that so far from being the direct product of distinct acts of creation, the various forms of plants and animals have been gradually evolved in a slow gradation of increasing complexity; and when it is recognized by a large majority of naturalists that the explanation of this wonderful relation of connection between previously-existing and later forms is to be found in the constant tendency to variation during development and growth, and the perpetuation of such variations by hereditary transmission through successive generations in the long but incalculable lapse of the earth's natural mutations. These, as you must all be aware, are in their essential features the views now known as Darwinism, which were first simultaneously brought forward by Wallace and Darwin in 1858, and which, after being more fully elaborated in the works of the latter and ably supported by the former, secured, in the incredibly short space of ten or twelve years, the general approval of a large portion of the scientific world. The change of opinion is, in fact, now such that there are few scientific works on natural history, whether of a special or more general character, in which the relation which the facts of science bear to the newer doctrines is not carefully pointed out; that, with the general public too, the words 'Evolution' and 'Development' have ceased to excite the feelings, amounting almost to horror, which they at first produced in the minds of those to whom they were equally unfamiliar and suspicious; and that even in popular literature and ephemeral effusions direct or metaphorical illustrations are drawn in such terms of the Darwinian theory as 'struggle for existence,' 'natural selection,' 'survival of the fittest,' 'heredity,' 'atavism,' and the like.

"It cannot be doubted that in this country, as on the Continent, the influence of authority had much to do with the persistence of the older teleological views; and, as has been well remarked by Haeckel, one of the ablest and keenest supporters of the modern doctrine, the combined influence more especially of the opinions held by three of the greatest naturalists and biologists who have ever lived, viz., Linnæus, Haller, and Cuvier, men unsurpassed in the learning of their time, and the authors of important discoveries in a wide range of biological science, was decidedly adverse to the free current of speculative thought upon the more general doctrines of biology. And if it were warrantable to attribute so great a change of opinion as that to which I have adverted as occurring in my own time to the influence of any single intellect, it must be admitted that it is justly due to the vast range and accuracy of his knowledge of scientific facts, the quick appreciation of their mutual interdependence, and above all the unexampled clearness and candor in statement of Charles Darwin.

"But while we readily acknowledge the large share which Darwin has had in guiding scientific thought into the newer tracts of biological doctrine, we shall also be disposed to allow that the slow and difficult process of emancipation from the thralldom of dogmatic opinion in regard to a system of creation, and the adoption of large and independent views more consistent with observation, reason, philosophy, and religion, has only been possible under the effect of the general progress of scientific knowledge and the acquisition of sounder methods of applying its principles to the explanation of natural phenomena."

President Thomson's address concludes with the following words: "I consider it impossible, therefore, for any one to be a faithful student of embryology, in the present state of science, without at the same time becoming an evolutionist. There may still be many