Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/773

Rh around him. He had a brain which could devise and invent, a memory which enabled him to accumulate experience, and a strong power of sympathy which made him a highly social being, combining with others in the struggle for life.



At one time naturalists looked upon the animal kingdom as complete from the beginning, and, when it became certain that different kinds of animals had appeared from time to time upon the earth, the naturalists of fifty years ago could have no grander conception than that new creatures were separately made (they scarcely asked themselves how), and put into the world as they were wanted.

But a higher and better explanation was soon to be found, for there was growing up among us the greatest naturalist and thinker of our day, that patient searcher after truth, Charles Darwin, whose genius and earnest labors opened our eyes gradually to a conception so deep, so true, and so grand, that side by side with it the idea of making an animal from time to time, as a sculptor makes a model of clay, seems too weak and paltry ever to have been attributed to an Almighty Power.