Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/665

Rh words—"can show that modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all organisms, subject to modifying influences." They can show, he goes on (if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), that any existing plant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins to undergo adaptive changes of form and structure; that in successive generations these changes continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new habits; that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals changes of the sort habitually occur; that the differences thus caused, as, for example, in dogs, are often greater than those on which species in the wild state are founded, and that throughout all organic nature there is at work a modifying influence of the same sort as that which they believe to have caused the differences of species—"an influence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great variety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of change." What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-room philosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written seven years before Darwin published the "Origin of Species."

The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians before Darwin. Here are a few of them—Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates, Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer, Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. As well say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Leonardo made the Italian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary movement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousand predecessors worked up toward him; a thousand contemporaries helped to diffuse and to confirm his various principles.

Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the special notion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that, while plants and animals vary perpetually and very indefinitely, all the varieties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances of the species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the struggle for life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, because every point of advantage similarly tells in the individual's favor in that ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to the evolutionary concept, fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the general principle of descent with modification, that won over the whole world to the "Darwinian theory," Before Darwin, many men of science were evolutionists; after Darwin, all men of science became so at once, and the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow their leadership.

As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this—that plants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitive living creature, which was itself the product of light and heat acting