Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/516

502 making knowledge impossible it glorifies ignorance. What is left for the student of Nature save to record facts as lie finds them when every question as to how things have come to be as they are receive but the one reply, ‘The Creator designed them so’?”

It is not my intention or wish to defend in itself the doctrine of design, nor is this the place to review the reviewer or criticise the above-quoted criticism; but such uncalled-for prejudice and illogical reasoning as shown therein do cause the question to arise, What, after all, is the real motive for scientific research?

A little over fifty years ago a young Englishman was busily engaged in gathering and arranging all kinds of facts in regard to changes in animals and plants, either under domestication or in a state of Nature. For twenty years or more he worked patiently and carefully gathering his facts, comparing and arranging them and mentally digesting all this mass of material, and, at last, in 1859, he offered to the world his theory of the Origin of Species. Before Charles Darwin, all naturalists were engaged in gathering and recording facts, and arranging them in a more or less natural order, but they failed to compare and digest them, as he did, because they were content with statistics and did not ask for reasons. That this was due to a belief in the immutability of species and the doctrine of design there can be little doubt; but that the great men who accepted that doctrine did so because it “saved intellectual toil” or “glorified ignorance” is a gross slander. They did so partly because of early training, but very largely because it was a satisfactory explanation of such problems as they happened to meet and so proved its sufficiency. When Darwin, however, came to apply it to the facts as he found them in his day, he soon proved it was not sufficient, and then was asked for the first time in biology, How did these things come to be so? The question had been asked long before in physics, chemistry, and astronomy; but until the middle of this century biologists and even geologists had been chiefly concerned with the question ? and had neglected the far more important one ? It was the asking of this question, and the answer to it which he gave, which makes Darwin the bright particular star in the scientific firmament of the nineteenth century, and no lapse of time can ever dim the luster of that honored name. However inadequate we may consider the theory of natural selection to account for all the innumerable forms of animal and plant life which have existed or do now inhabit and beautify the earth, there can be no doubt that the question as an answer to which it was offered has been for thirty-five years the mainspring of research not merely in biology but in all the field of natural science. It is easy to see how this condition