Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/343

Rh variance within itself, from the differing influences of pride, prejudice, and incapacity." The genius of Cuvier was able to inspire this "miscellaneous being" with an interest in the science of comparative anatomy. Few minds could fail to be struck and powerfully impressed by the wonderful principle of correlation, which enables the skilful anatomist from a small portion of an organism ideally to reconstruct the whole fabric; from a fossil tooth, to explain the shape, the food, the habits of an animal that had never been seen by the eye of any mortal man. Round Cuvier gathered a great band of scientific workers, and in his own special subject he remains the monumental standard of comparison by which other men's abilities are estimated.

A colloquial but expressive phrase describes a dull boy by saying that "he will never set the Thames on fire." In the estimate of his friends apparently Charles Darwin was a dull boy. He ended by setting not only the Thames on fire, but the whole world ablaze, with the light and heat that his speculations kindled. What Linnæus had been to the latter half of the eighteenth century, that was Darwin to the latter half of the nineteenth. The artificial classification of Linnæus is discarded by botanists. Every specialist can in his own subject point out errors committed by Linnæus. And yet the glory of the man remains untarnished. Natural History of the modern era began with him. He is the founder of it. In like manner the fame of Darwin will not suffer diminution, if some of those whom he has sent wandering through the thousand avenues of research find something to correct in his arguments or to modify in his theories. Biology of the modern era began with him. He is the founder of it.

Whether any of these illustrious men personally deserved credit is a pleasing subject ever open to debate. Original ideas always run two risks, first of being condemned as mischievous novelties, and then of being stigmatized as shameless plagiarisms. The ancients have constantly been convicted of stealing our best jokes, and they have evidently tried to rub the gloss off some of our finest scientific discoveries by rather too plainly speaking of them before they were made. Therefore, while extolling the men who seem to have been most signally effective in raising natural science out of obscurity into prominence, we may readily own that minds and ideas, like species, are no result of abrupt