Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/25

Rh by Moses Stuart. Neither of the great English universities, as a rule, took any notice of the innovators save by sneers.

To this current of thought there was joined a new element, when, in 1844, Robert Chambers published his Vestiges of Creation. The book was attractive and was widely read; in Chambers's view the several series of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, were the result of two distinct impulses, each given once and for all time by the Creator. The first of these was an impulse imparted to forms of life lifting them gradually through higher grades; the second was an impulse tending to modify organic substances in accordance with external circumstances; in fact, the doctrine of the book was evolution tempered by miracle, a stretching out of the creative act through all time a pious version of Lamarck.

Two results followed one mirth-provoking, the other leading to serious thought. As to the former, the theologians were greatly alarmed by the book; it was loudly insisted that it promoted atheism. Looking back along the line of thought which has since been developed, one feels that the Church ought to have put up public thanksgivings for Chambers's theory and public prayers that it might prove true. As to the serious result, it accustomed men's minds to a belief in evolution as in some form possibly or even probably true. In this way it was provisionally of service.

Eight years later Herbert Spencer published an essay contrasting the theories of creation and evolution, reasoning with great force in favor of the latter, showing that species had undoubtedly been modified by circumstances; but still only few and chosen men saw the significance of all these lines of reasoning which had been converging during so many years toward one conclusion.

On July 1, 1858, there were read before the Linnæan Society at London two papers one presented by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel Wallace and with the reading of these papers the doctrine of evolution by natural selection was born. Then and there a fatal breach was made in the great theological barrier of the continued fixity of species since the creation.

The story of these papers the scientific world knows by heart: how Charles Darwin, having been sent to the University of Cambridge to fit him for the Anglican priesthood, left it in 1831 to go upon the scientific expedition of the "Beagle"; how for five years he studied with wonderful vigor and acuteness the problems of life as revealed on land and at sea among volcanoes and coral reefs, in forests and on the sands, from the tropics to the arctic regions; how, in the Cape de Verde and the Galapagos Islands, and in Brazil, Patagonia, and Australia he interrogated Nature with matchless persistency and skill; how he returned