Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/841

Rh him. Mr. Butler's books, therefore, though useful as antidotes in the hands of those who understood the facts, could only mislead and puzzle outsiders. Nevertheless, they did actually do this piece of good service: they brought out in strong relief the true nature of Charles Darwin's magnificent life work, as consisting entirely in the establishment of the principle of natural selection—a principle which made the previously discredited notion of descent with modification immediately commend itself to the whole biological world of his time, and more particularly to the younger generation. As to my own little book on Charles Darwin, if I dare to allude to it here, though it also insisted (from the opposite and sympathetic standpoint) upon this same cardinal fact, and likewise dwelt to a somewhat less degree upon the central importance of Mr. Spencer's position, it was published only in a popular series, and did not perhaps reach the eyes of those who mostly required to have these facts impressed upon them. I rejoice, therefore, that Mr. Clodd should have reopened this serious question, and especially that the discussion to which his work is likely to give rise may result in putting Mr. Spencer's true place in the evolutionary movement before the eyes of his contemporaries while he is still among us to be gratified by a recognition too long withheld him.

The needful rectification of public opinion on this subject, it seems to me, embraces two points. In the first place, as regards organic evolution, Darwin was not in any sense the orginator of the idea; he was anticipated by his own grandfather, by Lamarck, by Herbert Spencer (at least so far as priority of publication is concerned), and by several others. In the second place, as regards evolution in general, the idea was not Darwin's at all; it was entirely and solely Herbert Spencer's. Each of these two points I shall treat briefly but separately.

Everybody now knows that the idea of organic evolution—the conception that plants and animals were not miraculously created, but developed by natural causes from a common original—was far older than Charles or even than Erasmus Darwin. In a certain vague way it was anticipated by several early philosophers, and somewhat more definitely, though still nebulously, by Lucretius. In modern times, however, it first took a regularly scientific shape with Erasmus Darwin. Most people believed that the theory never progressed beyond that somewhat amorphous stage up to the time when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This is a serious mistake. The concept, once set on foot, grew rapidly in definiteness and in fullness of scientific basis up to the moment of Charles Darwin's cardinal discovery. With Erasmus Darwin, it was little more than a brilliant though pregnant aperçu; with Lamarck, it became a powerfully supported