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Library
CHARLES DARWIN

Three Appreciations.

By

J. M. Macfarlane

I. Darwin in Relation to his own and the
Pre-Darwinian Period.

Il. Lessons from the Life and Writings
of Charles.Darwin.

III. The Legacy left us by-Darwin and his.
Collaborators.

Philadelphia
1969
CHARLES DARWIN

Three Appreciations

By

J. M. Macfarlane

PAGE
I. Darwin in Relation to his own and the

Pre-Darwinian Period. ...... . 3

II. Lessons from the Life and Writings

of Charles Darwin. ........ .25
Ill. The Legacy left us by Darwin and his
Collaborators. .......... .41
Philadelphia

1909
DARWIN IN RELATION TO HIS OWN
AND THE PRE-DARWINIAN PERIOD.*

The twelfth of February, 1809, was unheralded in this coun-
try or in Europe as a day of happy omen. But could some
wise man then have interpreted the horoscope of the ages, he
would have proclaimed figuratively that the sun should stand
still, and that the moon should stay in its course, so that men
might learn throughout future ages, that great ones had been
born that day. For did not Darwin then appear, that he
might mould the intellectual thought of all future centuries,
and was not Lincoln ushered into the world, that he might guide
and save the highest destinies of a great nation. But fortu-
nate it is, and entirely in accord with evolutionary laws, that in
the ages already gone, as in the ages that will yet come, man-
kind must grope after, discover, and gradually welcome those
who are to prove its guides and deliverers. Thus only can the
true prophets be winnowed out from the false, and those of
ordinary message be distinguished from the great seers.

For us today the life work of that unrivaled seer of Nature,
Charles Darwin, in relation to that of his compeers and of his
predecessors, will amply furnish food for reflection.

It has often and truly been observed, that the times call forth
the man, and the saying was a trite one now. Darwin was
born into a family that for generations had striven to study
and interpret the laws of life; he was surrounded by scenes
and associations that caused him to reverence such laws; he
was favored by Dame Fortune and by friends who were alike

 

*Delivered before the Faculty and Students of Pennsylvania College,
Gettysburg, when Delegate from the University of Pennsylvania, 12th of
February, 1909,
propitious. So he grew up in an atmosphere that—consciously
or unconsciously to him—was acting on and influencing him
for his life-work. To put it in present day biological terms,
the environment was stimulating and moulding, the organism
gradually responded.

But let us glance backward through the century that preced-
ed his birth, in order that we may measure aright the forces at
work, the men who were moving, and the results that were
being achieved. Up to the commencement of that period the
wise observations, and even wiser guesses or speculations, of
early Greek philosophers like Empedocles, Aristotle and
Theophrastus had largely been neglected, or mixed up with
silly tales, by the herbalists and naturalists who succeeded them,
and who flourished unchecked, until after the European Re-
naissance.

But with the discovery of new continents and lands, with
the advent of a spirit of travel and along with it the closer ob-
severance of natural objects, with the increase in collections
of these objects at the European centers of learning and com-
merce, there appeared eminent botanists like Tournefort, Ray
and Linnaeus, or zoologists like Sarrasin, Buffon and Cuvier,
who strove to analyze, to understand, and to classify the masses
of material that came to their hands. A false religious dogma,
that had grown ever stronger with the centuries, almost com-
pelled them to view each species as a separate creation, in spite
of protests offered against such a position even so early as by
the Church father, Augustine.

Great has been this power of dogma, and intellectual giants
were needed to burst its withering bonds. Of the six natural-
ists above named one alone attempted the task.

Buffon (1707-1788) inherited wealth, he could enjoy leisure
if he so desired, he respected if he did not fear the Church; but
his mind was penetrating, keen, speculative, generalizing, at
the same time that it was analytic. So as groups of animals
passed before him for study, graded resemblances, as well as
marked differences in the species arrested his attention. Fol-

4
lowing many clues he was led to declare that “one is surprised
at the rapidity with which species vary, and the ease with which
they lose their primitive characteristics in gradually taking on
new forms.” Even the struggle for existence, survival of the
fittest, and the power of heredity were all present to his mind,
at times in crude, at times in rather elaborate form. But fear
of the Church was more to him than to Galileo, and love of the
truth less. For after seeming to breathe the thought for the
benefit of future generations “I have sown the seed of evolution-
ary doctrine, let others dare to water and to tend it against
the anathemas of the Fathers,” he would exclaim in pious re-
volt from his deeper convictions, or in secret regard for the
feelings of the Church, “No! such variations arose in perfect
shape from the Creator.”

But the gifted and brilliant Francis Bacon had woven just
such views into his many diversified explanations of na-
ture. So with the writings of the latter, and the personal con-
tact of the former beside him, in the museum of the Jardin
des Plantes, Lamarck, the second great personage, arose to
give lifelong testimony to the truth of organic evolution.

Though of noble birth he was propelled and impelled all his
life by comparative poverty ; he loved the study alike of plants
and animals; he was rapid, clear, and exact in his descriptions ;
he had great capacity for classification, and withal a mind
that worked toward great generalizations. Opportunity for
travel as a tutor in his earlier years, caused him to note the
changed aspect of plants in relation to changed environments,
and later the rich collections of the Parisian museum and of
the surrounding gardens, brought him face to face with the
problems of life. Slowly but emphatically he was led to the
important conclusion, that environment and function mould
and determine form, or in other words that as are the sur-
roundings and activities of the organism, so is it slowly adapt-
ed in its form and structure to suit such relations. Nay, more,
use tends, he said, to strengthen and improve an organ, dis-
use leads to gradual degeneration and decay; an excellent
adage this that all the ages of mankind suggest the truth of,
whether they realize it or not.

Again, in his “Hydrogéologie,” he exclaims, “For Nature
time is nothing. It is never a difficulty, she always has it at
her disposal; and it is for her the means by which she has
accomplished the greatest as well as the least of her results.
For all the evolution of the earth and of living beings Nature
needs but three elements, space, time and matter.” Had he
lived now he would surely have added a fourth energy.

In the closing years of his life, with eyesight gone, with
poverty around, with few sympathizers to cheer him, tended
and encouraged only by a loving daughter, Lamarck bequeath-
ed his written views with an appealing earnestness to suc-
ceeding generations of men. The legacy today is willingly ac-
cepted and cherished, while the name and memory of the man
stand second only to those of Darwin.

But even while he wrote and observed, other minds were
busy along similar lines. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather to
Charles, seems independently to have reached like conclusions
with Lamarck, though we cannot share the views of those who
have suggested, that communication in those days was too
restricted for Darwin to have read, or at least learned of, and
profited by, the works of Lamarck. But Erasmus was not
a wide observer nor minute experimenter. Geoffrey St. Hil-
aire, disciple and fellow countryman of Lamarck, strove to
make fashionable and to extend the teachings of his master.
But the massive erudition and the unrivaled popularity of
Cuvier, during the early part of last century, overwhelmed the
claims to a hearing, alike of the evolutionary master and his
disciple. For to Cuvier, concerned only with the description
of separate living types, and the bringing of bone to bone in
extinct forms, species were fixed and determinate entities.

But though Truth may slumber it never dies. And so when
Charles Darwin had left school, after showing no indication
that he would ever become “a man 0’ pairts,”’ he went to Edin-
burgh University. There his father and grandfather before

6
him had observed science while they studied medicine. There,
also, during the two years of his stay, he came into touch with
Grant, Coldstream, Greville, and Macgillivray, all enthusiasts
in different branches of Natural History. Of Grant, Darwin
says, “I knew him well; he was dry and formal in manner, with
much enthusiasm beneath this outer crust. He one day, when
we were walking together, burst forth in high admiration of
Lamarck and his views on evolution. I listened in silent as-
tonishment and as far as I can judge without any effect on
my mind. I had previously read the Zoonomia of my grand-
father, in which similar views are maintained, but without
producing any effect on me. Nevertheless it is probable that
the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and
praised, may have favored my upholding them under a dif-
ferent form in my “Origin of Species.”

Of his stay in Edinburgh and his relation to it, Darwin al-
ways retained the kindliest memories. Thus in later years,
whether it was his recalling earliest efforts in observation and
in publication of results ; his desire to see his illustrious friend,
Hooker, in one of its University chairs; his reception of the
honor of election to the Royal and Royal Medical Societies of
that city; or his regret that some there failed to share in his
evolutionary views; his words always carried a sympathetic
note.

But for Medicine Darwin had never been built, while some
of his teachers there at that-time had better have been pen-
sioned, than to have been continued as “dead wood,” while
others of them—learned and unrivaled in their fields—were
dry and unattractive to the philosophic and far-reaching mind
of Darwin.

So Cambridge and Holy Orders were next tried, but with
the happy result for him that he secured the life-long and warm
friendship of Henslow, the learned, courteous and sympathetic
botanist; as well as the acquaintance of Sedgwick the geolo-
gist, brilliant, impetuous, lazy and active by turns, now burst-
ing into invective, now tender as a friend. Entomology be-

7
came his favorite pastime. But as at Edinburgh, so here,
his excursions with kindred spirits over field, fell, and moun-
tain, were slowly but surely determining his career.

Thus it happened that when the usual period of University
residence work was successfully completed, he looked rather
to the realm of Natural Science as his future life-work. By
the strong recommendation of Henslow, and the encourage-
ment of his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, of Pottery fame, he was
appointed Naturalist to the Beagle, a small British war
schooner, of about 240 tons. Captain Fitzroy, the commander,
was a young man with bull-dog tenacity of purpose, with high
sense of duty and order, with desire for fame and advance-
ment, whether in cultivating the arts of peace or of war. He
had offered, in the daring spirit of a Columbus, a Drake, or a
Cook, to explore and map out the ocean and the land areas of
the southern hemisphere. Exactly stated “the object of the
expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra
del Fuego, to survey the shores of Chili, Peru and some Pacific
Islands, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements
around the world.”

For five years the little cockle and its inhabitants tossed
about over the southern seas, while Darwin rejoiced in a little
bunk that was at once chart room, laboratory and bedroom.

And with what result? Today we build splendid Biological
Halls, we equip them with costly apparatus, we give ample
facilities for students to learn, but we too often fail to remem-
ber that “the man behind the helm” is the guiding genius who
gives inspiration to the whole. Darwin, in that little bunk,
made it simultaneously a laboratory, a silent lecture room and
a study, from which waves of influence have gone forth that
will never cease. With the progress of that world’s ogre and
monster War, Britain, hike America, is ever breaking up her
old war vessels, to make way for the new and more terrible,
But I venture to predict that had the Beagle been laid up,
when her days of voyaging had ended, as a type of war ves-
sel that had gathered a richer harvest from conquering and

8
constructive Science than from destructive War, that little ship
would have become, within a century, one of the Meccas of the
world, as being consecrated by the life-work of a Darwin and
a Fitzroy.

We can only glance at the impressions made on the Natural-
ist as he moved from region to region, and which later were
in part collected and published popularly as “A Naturalist’s
Voyage Around the World.” On December 27th, 1831, the
shores of Britain were left behind, and by Jahuary 7th, 1832,
the Peak of Teneriffe was sighted. Here his geological en-
thusiasm was stirred, and guidance was sought from Lyell’s
“Principles of Geology,” a source alike in the man and his
writings, that Darwin often turned to afterwards when need-
ing geological advice. The Cape Verde Islands, the forests of
Brazil, the plains of La Plata, the inhospitable shores of Pata-
gonia, and the earthquake-shaken regions of Chile all yielded
food for reflection, that later was utilized in his great publica-
tions.

But when the Galapagos Islands were reached the toute
ensemble of their geology, botany and zoology, stirred Dar-
win’s mind to special activity, and left on it an impression that
never faded. The Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, Australia,
and the Cape of Good Hope, as well as intervening points, were
successively touched. So when the Beagle again came to
anchor in England, on October 2d, 1836, the five years’ voyage
had brought to the Naturalist stores of information, suggestive
notes and queries, abundant material for future study by
specialists, a wide knowledge of the living things of the world
and not least, perhaps, of man himself, that stood him in good
stead to a life’s close.

What the impressions were of the man who had thus toiled
to achieve, may best be summarized in an extract from his
brother to Prof. Henslow, on receipt of a batch of letters from
Charles, also in the testimony of two of his shipmates who
afterwards rose to honor as Admiral Sir. J. Sulivan and Ad-
miral Mellersh.
His brother says, “There is a natural, good humored energy
in his letters, just like himself.” The second wrote after Dar-
win’s death, “I can confidently express my belief that during
the five years in the Beagle, he was never known to be out of
temper, or to say one unkind or hasty word of, or to any one.
You will, therefore, readily understand how this, combined
with the admiration of his energy and ability, led to our giving
him the name of “The dear old philosopher.” Mellersh wrote,
“I think he was the only man I ever knew against whom I
never heard a word said; and as people, when shut up in a
ship for five years, are apt to get cross with each other, that is
saying a good deal.” The somewhat comic side of it is re-
vealed in the sailors’ sobriquet for him, “the fly-catcher.”

Those years of voyage had been busy on@mhis movements
had’ often been uncertain when on land, and meal times were
not always punctual; seasickness also was his bete noir. So
when he arrived home better councils suggested rest, but his
eager spirit called for work. Therefore, symptoms of increas-
ing fatigue and illness developed, that were to cast a constant
shadow over full forty years of his life. No nobler, no more
heroic, no more patient sufferer ever contributed to the progress
of Science, than did Charles Darwin during those four decades
that were left to him. But that he remained throughout it all
the happy, genial correspondent, kind friend, and wise coun-
sellor to many, is but added proof of his qualities as a man.

Six years of the excitements and strains of London life, con-
firmed Darwin in the belief, that a quiet retreat amid rural sur-
roundings, would alone enable him to pursue his studies. So
from 1842 onward, Down became to all of his friends the home
where quiet hospitality, interested discussion, and short walks
combined to make a week-end stay a pleasant memory.

But those six years in London had been busy ones. He had
printed the journal of his researches; he had pondered much
and noted much as to the origin of species; he had grappled
with many intricate geological problems; and by aid of his
now fast friend, Sir Charles Lyell, he had reached important

Io
conclusions. Thus by the time that he was inclined to move
out of the city he had ready for publication his epoch-making
work on “The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs.”

Though the later observations of Murray, backed by all the
resources of the “Challenger” expedition, have modified some
of the conclusions there stated, the bulk of them are now part
of all geological and zoological literature.

Speaking from the standpoint of a botanist, I need not at-
tempt to enlarge on the laborious work that Darwin under-
took in describing the groups of acorn-shells and barnacles,
which occupied much of his time for about six years. Rather let
me emphasize the personality that came more and more closely
into contact with him as fellow scientist, as friend, as helper,
and who possibly more than any other man aided Darwin on-
ward to the pinnacle of success that he ultimately reached.
Joseph D. Hooker and he were of companionable age, both
had engaged in voyages of biological import, both had friends
in common, while each saw in the other qualities that made
them, in time, as a David and a Jonathan. On this day of Cen-
tennial celebration it should rejoice us to know that though
now oI years old, he is still hale and active, ready as of old to
lend a helping mand, and to speak a word of cheer to younger
workers in his chosen field. A three-page letter, written by
and received from him, just two weeks ago, is highest proof, if
aught such were needed, that his eye is not dimmed, neither
is his natural force abated.

It undoubtedly was due mainly to this friendship that Dar-
win was almost insensibly drawn into the study of plants,
which ultimately yielded him some of the most convincing
illustrations of evolutionary principles. This it was which
caused Darwin, after discussing some plant details, to write to
his friend in one of his cheery letters “but I must stop; other-
wise by Jove I shall be transformed into a botanist. I wish I
had been one.” And again he writes to Asa Gray, “Botany
has been followed in so much more a philosophical spirit than

It
Zoology, that I scarcely ever like to trust any general remark
in Zoology, without I find that botanists concur.”

The years from 1850 to 1859, when the “Origin of
Species” appeared, were truly fermenting and stimulating for
the biological world. Rafinesque, like Grant, had caught up
the mantle of Lamarck, and at no great distance from where
we now are, though nearly 70 years ago, he proclaimed doc-
trines of plant evolution which differed little from those that
some of us now entertain.

But the work that unquestionably arrested attention, that
at once achieved great popularity, that soon ran through edi-
tion after edition, that was talked of and debated in many
homes, as the writer while a child can still well remember, was
“The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” Though
scientifically loose or inaccurate in many of its statements, the
daring and originality of its plan, the fine diction in which the
thoughts were clothed, and the great unknown author who—
like Scott in his earlier novels—failed to reveal himself, all
conspired to rivet popular attention on the theme. Robert
Chambers, author and publisher, deserves a better mead of
praise for his efforts than has yet been given. Pleasant it is
to know that he, as its author, enjoyed with great glee the
tokens of approval and of fierce disapproval that his work
called forth.

Meanwhile Darwin labored on, and accumulated great stores
of facts on variation and heredity in plants and animals, on
flower forms and structure, on seed distribution, on geological
changes over land and water. Afraid that all might be lost to
future thinkers did his death come, he made special provision
that the whole should be handed over to named executors as
editors. But “man is immortal till his work is done,” and as
we look back now, it can be said that much work still remained
for him to accomplish.

Soon two additional figures of high import began to loom
up. Herbert Spencer and Alfred R. Wallace were both en-
dowed with observant, analytic, cautious, yet withal specula-

12
tive and generalizing minds. Neither had received a special
biological training. The former, even through life, remained
largely a closet philosopher and naturalist. The latter—like
Hooker still happily spared to us amid accumulated years and
honors—qualified himself by long periods of travel and ob-
servation, in the tropics of the new and the old world, for
grappling with problems of life.

The former held his course like a lone star in splendor, build-
ing up a system of evolutionary truth on a pre-established plan
of his own. His data throughout were largely gathered by
others, his power to marshal these was marvellous, though at
times, of necessity, faulty.

But Darwin and Wallace almost simultaneously had reached
the point, where their views on the origin of living things seem-
ed ripe for publication. Both men, in a spirit that has often
been praised, joined forces to present these in 1858. Soon
the younger drew off in generous appreciation of the enormous
body of facts already gathered by the elder, so that the field
was clear for the appearance in 1859—just fifty years ago—
of Darwin’s early masterpiece “The Origin of Species.” And
soon round this, as round the standard of an opposing army, a
battle long and fierce was waged.

Followmg the standard-bearer to the field of action, from
the common mass of men, were those who had waited for a
leader who, might guide them out of the man-evolved quag-
mires of special creation and species fixity to some standpoint
of better vision. Following also were others who trusted, half
in fear and half in faith. that the standard now raised would
never fall, but prove the rallying center for biological truth
through future decades and centuries. Following also were -
those who, like the ancient Athenians, desired “either to tell
or to hear some new thing.” Opposed to them was almost the
entire body of conservative and not least of religious thinkers.

The newspaper press, the monthly and quarterly magazines,
the pulpit, the platform, the meetings of scientific societies, all
became fields for the exploitation of opposing views. And witty

13
things were penned, as, for example, when a jeering opponent
in the Athenaeum said “If a monkey has become a man, what
may not a man become?” Within four years of its publication
Charles Kingsley wrote, “The state of the scientific mind is
most curious, Darwin is conquering everywhere and rushing in
like a flood, by mere force of truth and fact. The one or two
to hold out are forced to try all sorts of subterfuges.”

In this “Origin of Species” Darwin freely admits how one
guiding principle came to him so early as 1838 when he read
Malthus “On Population.” The struggle for existence is
omnipresent with us, and is more powerfully exemplified in
man’s history, probably, than in that of any other animal.

But a logical result and extension to Malthus’ teaching came
to Darwin in his great principal of Natural Selection, or as
Spencer strikingly phrased it in later days, “Survival of the
Fittest.” The advocacy of this as a biological law constituted
Darwin’s claim to a place alongside Galileo, Newton and La-
marck. Round this as a central principle he showed how in-
dividuals of a species had varied, had migrated, had survived
in some members and been blotted out in others; had become
adapted to their surroundings in some cases, and been killed
out by the effects of these surroundings in others.

If we stop here to enquire what were the strong points that
caused the book to achieve within a decade of its publication a
marvellous revolution, we would say that it resulted from Dar-
win’s balanced combination of the methods of observation, ex-
periment, reflection, collation, and generalization. Few of
those who reviled the book and its author knew, that behind
the great and suggestive aggregation of facts, were abundant

_Stores of material that would yet appear in successive publi-
cations, as flanking battlements to strengthen and fortify the
central structure.

High and honest effort had its reward, for within a quarter
century, upwards of one hundred thousand copies had been
sold, which were printed in every tongue of the civilized world;
while, as one of his biographers says, “He revolutionized not

14
merely half a dozen sciences, but the whole current of think-
ing men’s lives.” Darwin measured the acceptance of his views
amongst naturalists in a letter to a friend thus, “I am sur-
prised to find it most commonly accepted by geologists, next
by botanists, and least by zoologists.” But the rising floods of
paleontological and embryological evidence soon swept the last
group into front rank. Such a result was powerfully aided by
the advocacy of another great convert to evolution, Thomas
Henry Huxley. Gifted with ready dialectic qualities, with sharp
discriminating—even though, at times, hasty and biased—in-
tellect, with wide knowledge of animal life, and with a polish-
ed, classic style of composition, he at once ranged himself cau-
tiously and discriminatingly on the side of the master. A
man of marked likes and dislikes, having placed himself there,
he was there to stay. As the years rolled past he increasingly
subscribed to the principles accepted, but discriminated later
as to the relative value to be attached to each.

Here I may be allowed to quote one or two of his estimates,
that were published by him after Darwin’s death, regarding
contemporary and earlier workers, “I am not likely,” he says,
“to take a low view of Darwin’s position in the history of
science, but I am disposed to think that Buffon and Lamarck
would run him hard in both genius and fertility. In breadth of
view and extent of knowledge these two men were giants,
though we are apt to forget their services.” ‘Darwin had a
clear, rapid intelligence, a great memory, a vivid imagination,
and what made his greatness was the strict subordination of
all these to his love of truth.” Again, in comparing him with
General Gordon, he says, “Of all the people whom I have met
with in my life, he and Darwin are the two in whom IJ have
found something bigger than ordinary humanity—an un-
equalled simplicity and directness of purpose—a sublime un-
selfishness.” And again of the great figures that adorned the
first half of the Victorian epoch, he writes ‘that Faraday,
Lyell, and Darwin, had exerted the greatest influence, and all

15
three were models of the highest and best class of physical
philosophers.”

The years from 1860 to 1880 were busy ones for Darwin,
though they were broken and clouded with much sickness. I
need not remind any of you here of the storm of debate and
bitterness that broke out on publication of “The Descent of
Man” in 1871. But the above two decades covered the period
during which he most closely and extensively questioned Na-
ture from every standpoint. It was the time also when one
might truly say that he turned mainly to the botanical world
for amplification of his fundamental views.

The variations of species amongst plants and animals had
often been doubted; Buffon, Lamarck, Rafinesque and others
had emphasized it. Darwin’s two volumes on “Variation” that
focussed the facts, and that illuminated this field of study, have
been mines of information for all future students.

But those remarkable botanical works that next issued from
the fertile brain of Darwin, revolutionized botanical stand-
points. If but to refresh our memories, we would name
them chronologically. “The Fertilization of Orchids” (1862),
“The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants” (1865), “In-
sectivorous Plants” (1875), “Cross and Self Fertilization”
(1876), “The Different Forms of Flowers” (1877), “The
Power of Movement in Plants” (1880). Nor should we
forget the striking closing volume, that was written just as
the pen was becoming dulled by age, “The Formation of Vege-
table Mould by Earthworms” (1881). The thoughts these
books unfolded brought plants near to us as sentient personal
friends, and the passing years since then have but served to
deepen the friendship. They also bring across our field of
vision the last of those great spirits of the Darwinian period—
Asa Gray—who was playfully dubbed in turn by Darwin a
botanist, a poet, a lawyer and a theologian. We now have
before us the main events of what might rightly be termed
“the Evolutionary Century” that extended from 1770 to 1870,
Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin introduced and led up to

16
the great central figure whose memory we have met to rever-
ence today. On either side of him stand Spencer and Wallace,
powerful co-workers in elaborating a scientific scheme of the
organic world.

Contributing to that end by their erudition and wide ex-
perience in chosen fields are Lyell, Hooker, Huxley and Asa
Gray. Truly a galaxy of scientific worthies, that any century
or even millenium might be proud to call its own!

Let us now attempt to estimate briefly the legacy that has
been bequeathed to us today. We have already said that Dar-
win pre-eminently taught us to view plants—and we may well
extend it to animals—as personal friends, who, without of-
fense, might be cross-questioned, experimented with, confided
in, as did Darwin with Hooker, and Hooker with Darwin.
Such a standpoint enables us to get the perspective of indi-
vidual organisms, and of great groups of organisms, in their
true evolutionary relation.

All naturalists had readily accepted heredity as a necessary
basis and requirement for continuity of life. Dogmatically
and almost unquestioningly they had accepted it also as true,
that each group of individuals we call a species, handed down
with most mathematical precision the structures, functions, and
affinities of each. Hard and fast biological lines were to them
everything. Change, variation, modification, adaptation were
to them impossible. From the standpoint almost wholly of
pure morphology as related to environmental agents, Buffon
and Lamarck with lesser lights around and after, while ac-
cepting the power of hereditary action demanded the factors
that the others opposed. It is Darwin’s crowning glory and
achievement, that from every possible side he gathered facts
which proved that the Malthusian doctrine for man was true for
all living things. At one time he was experimenting with the
continued portability over, and vitality in salt water, of varie-
ties of seeds. Some species lived, others died in the process.
Of those that lived one, a few, or many of a species might
germinate, the others died. At another time he was proving that

17
close inbreeding was weakening and hurtful to plants, as is
outbreeding between distinct species. And so he enunciated
the remarkable and far-reaching physiological law that “Na-
ture abhors perpetual self-fertilization.” Thus at the same
time he supplied the key that Sprengel groped after, had al-
most reached, but ultimately missed, when he explained and
illustrated beautiful and diversified floral adaptations.

Again he is proving for the sundew or Drosera that a hither-
to supposedly dull and sluggish plant, can by its hairs per-
ceive and respond to a weight that was the 1/78,740 part of
a grain; that thereafter its hairs can incurve round a fly to
secure its capture, and can propagate a stimulus from cell to
cell, that may spread through the entire leaf. We can quite
share his feelings then, when he exclaims in rapture, “By Jove,
I sometimes think Drosera is a disguised animal.” He further
shows that the degree of response in forms related to it, varies
markedly, and that such may be in themselves determining
factors in the future perpetuation or extermination of each.

Once more the diversities amongst twining plants in shape,
in capacity for revolving motion, and thereby for twining round
stronger supports, result in beneficial exposure to light, but
yield varying degrees of beneficial effect, that may ultimately
determine the life or death of each species.

And though it is true, as Huxley broadly hinted, and as
his publishers probably felt, that his English was often wrung
from him in disjointed form, it is equally true that he seems to
take the reader into the inner sanctuary of Nature with him
by some gleeful, graphic, or picturesque description. These
simple touches of a discoverer’s gladness aided not a little in
bringing converts to his side.

So, with heredity accepted, variation and struggle for ex-
istence became to him and his colleagues watchwords for ad-
vance

Were we to treat the mental attitude of Darwin and his
colleagues in exact sequence, we should now review his brill-
iant development of the principle of Natural Selection, or—

18
after Spencer—Survival of the Fittest. But to the speaker as
to many of recent years an all-important principle should
logically and biologically be first studied and accepted, namely,
the direct action of environmental agents on an organism, and
its reaction to these. This for Lamarck was of supreme im-
portance, and might appropriately be called his dynamic factor
in altering organisms. Not so for Darwin and his co-workers
in their earlier years of activity. But the facts in favor were
so prominent, the moulding effects were so correlated with the
environment, the results on the organism so evidently ex-
pressed over its person, the internal structure even so funda-
mentally modified to suit environment, that we do not wonder
when Darwin wrote to Hooker, “I hardly know why I am a
little sorry, but my present work is leading me to believe rather
more in the direct action of physical conditions. I presume
I regret it, because it lessens the glory of Natural Selection.”
But that these may prove most potent agents, that even or-
ganic conditions should act to gradually effect change, in co-
operation with Natural Selection, as in the wonderful Mas-
carene orchid Angraecum, that he so strikingly described, fail-
ed to impress him in any way profoundly.

Speaking for himself the writer would say, that this one
factor greatly outweighs all of the others in importance, and
that possibly it is capable of further and wide extension to a
degree that even the neo-Lamarckian does not go. But of this
more anon perhaps.

The acceptance of environmental action and its result in
conferring acquired characters on an organism, next raises the
once greatly debated question as to whether such acquired
characters may become hereditary. To this we would reply
that it is today as imperfectly and yet firmly demonstrated as is
the wider doctrine of evolution itself. Our cabbages, cauli-
flowers, kale and sprouts are all descendants from and modifica-
tions of the simple, primitive, wild cabbages that today cover
the chalk cliffs of England. But no one who sows cauli-

19
flower seeds expects to get kale, nor when he sows cabbage
seeds looks for Brussels sprouts.

Heredity, variation, environmental action and acquisition
slowly of new characters therefrom, the hereditary transmis-
sion of the characters to the future offspring, and struggle for
existence we would thus far postulate as co-harmonious and
co-working principles in the great evolutionary plan.

There is left to us now the study of that most cherished
child of Darwin’s genius, Natural Selection or Survival of the
Fittest. Columbus’ solution of the egg problem, seems even
complex alongside this. For to each of us as we watch a pot
of seedlings, a forest of saplings, a lot of twining beans, a nest
of spiders, a group of school children that we can follow to
their homes, the principle is beside us and is axiomatic. Some,
it may be one, alone survive, the remainder perish. But the
very continuity and universality of its machinery dulled us to
its activity, till Darwin and Wallace simultaneously pointed
out its deep meaning. And no one factor is so solemn, so fate-
ful, for the individual and even for the race, but no one holds:
out higher hopes for the further advancement of living things:

This it is that, as we cast our glance backward through
geologic time, explains how entire species, genera, families,
and even classes of plants and animals, have been swept out of
existence. This it is that enables us to construct a clear and
yet natural system of classification. For the sharply divided
species, genera, or families that exhibit affinities and yet dif-
ferences, are only possible and definable, because cohorts of in-
dividuals that would have graded over the differences have
disappeared. The wholesale deaths that have occurred in
families, condense and make more easily possible for us, the
construction of the family tree, at the same time that they
often puzzle us in our attempt to connect the more distant
branches.

Thus Evolution realizes for us the brilliant essayist’s
picture of “The Bridge of Time.” Here we may trace an out-
standing column—like the Scale mosses amongst plants, and

20
the Arachnids amongst animals—that still rises above the floods
of variational, environmental, and hereditary wear and tear;
there a base is alone visible, in the form of a Chara and a Wel-
witschia amongst plants, or an Amphioxrus and an Orni-
thorhynchus amongst animals. Adjoining columns with al-
most connecting arches, seem to rise mainly toward the newer
end of the bridge, that even in its geologic newness seems worn
and battered to the short-lived eye of man. Thus the Monocty-
ledons and Dicotyledons amongst plants, the Reptiles and Birds
amongst animals! Whoever first uttered the commonplace
proverb, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” saw far and well into
the riddle of the world’s history.

But “Natural Selection,” “Survival of the Fittest’? have be-
come to us, during the past half century, terms of encyclopzedic
significance. We too often think of them as indicating only
improving and advancing specialization. But as we look at a
patch of Obolaria or of Indian Pipe on the one hand, or at
Mistletoe, Dodder, or Beech-drops on the other, we realize
that selection and survival have given us degraded, simplified
types from a high ancestry, as a result of questionable com-
panionships on the one hand, and of slothful parasitic habits, on
the other. So saprophytism and parasitism gradually acquired
by these plants, stand for the “fittest” along degeneration lines.
And need we wonder that, as we carefully trace thefr family
histories, extinction seems to be the goal towards which they
are tending. Again, as we try to get a key to the peculiar
tinting of some flower, or to the adaptive coloration of some
animal, ‘“‘selection,” “survival,” lead us back to long-drawn
stages of gradual change, during which each flower has come
to harmonize more perfectly with some visiting insect or bird,
or each plant or animal has become colored like some rock, or
snow or foliage that is the usual environmental back-ground.
And thus in the latter case “mimicry” that once was popularly
associated with the doings of naughty boys or of stage-actors,
becomes one of the significant roles of life. The best imi-
tators become the world’s “fittest” occupants.

21
Darwin’s life had been a busy one, and through many of its
years a suffering one. What the man found to do he did
with all his might. So much so that not a few looked to him
for counsel and guidance in what many regard—and we be-
lieve regard rightly—as momentous issues in human existence ;
or, as he put it, “deep reflections on the deepest subject which
can fill a man’s mind.” To all such he gave a non-committal
reply, though to the end of his life—even if on rare occasions—
he ventured to speak delicately and guardedly, taking the at-
titude indicated by his son and biographer, who says, “He felt
strongly that a man’s religion is an essentially private matter,
and one concerning himself alone.”

He honestly replied by letter to an eager inquirer thus :—
“T have never systematically thought much on religion in re-
lation to science, or on morals in relation to society ; and with-
out steadily keeping my mind on such subjects for a Jong period,
I am really incapable of writing anything worth sending.”
Again, with beautiful candor, he wrote “the impossibility of
conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our
conscious selves, arose through chance seems to me the chief
argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an
argument of real value, I have never been able to decide.” In
still another letter he candidly and at some length placed his
thoughts on record.

Estimating all such statements, it is fair to say that Dar-
win devoted himself to explaining the riddle of the past up to
the stage of man’s advancing civilization, and left the riddle
of the present and the future for others to deal with. He
clearly perceived, in common with many others, that groups
and successive generations of men encrusted fair views of life
and of human development, with petrifying doctrines and dog-
mas; that the simple, sublime life of Christ had been blurred
and disfigured, like the lives of so many great and good ones
who have gone before, by mischievous, foolish and legendary
lore; that noble views of human life, and noble constitutions
for the guidance of nations had often been trampled and trod-

22
den in the dust, by those who should have upheld and even
further advanced them; last, and not least, that when he pre-
sented in calm and scientific array, an aggregation of facts
bearing on living things, these were most bitterly assailed by
those who least understood them, but who most needed to be
informed regarding the past and the present, as well as the
future of man and the universe. John Bright’s cutting remark,
when confronted and assailed by one of the next world’s wise
men, is worth remembering. “It surprises me,” said the il-
lustrious statesman, “how much he knows of the next world,
and how little he knows of this.” Humility is a garb that
Charles Darwin fitly wore, and which can well become all in
their journey through life.

We have now attempted very briefly, and so imperfectly, to
present some of the truths that the evolutionary century has
built up. But all of these were sealed truths to our forefathers
of 75 to 100 years ago. They are commonplace truths today
through the labors of that galaxy whose leader we now honor.
This appreciation of Darwin, therefore, is not merely or chiefly
a willing tribute to the genius of one or of several related
benefactors of the human race. It is a great commemoration
of the emancipation of human thought, from the thralls of
withering species-circumscription, of restricted investigation,
of philosophic and religious dogma, of supposed limited hu-
man capacity and possibility.

Thus while on this Lincoln and Darwin day, the strains of
“Yankee Doodle,” that remind us of a primitive sarcasm are
now mingled with the words and strains of “The Star Spangled
Banner,” to form the triumphant rallying hymn for a nation of,
freemen, so it may well be accepted, on this Darwin and Lin-
coln day, that the reviewer’s sneer, “If a monkey has become
a man, what may not a man become,” is now mingled with the
truths of organic evolution as the ideal for mankind in his
struggle towards freedom of the mind.

Therefore, iri closing this centennial commemoration may we
not unitedly exclaim :—

23
Abraham Lincoln—man of the people, champion of freedom
for the body!

Charles Darwin—advocate of freedom for the body, cham-
pion of freedom for the mind!

We hail you today, twin stars of surpassing splendor in the
firmament of 19th century evolution. This nation, mind-
ful of Washington and Gettysburg, bows in solemn memorial
to the one; this world, mindful of London and Down, bows in
solemn memorial to the other. Today we, children of trium-
phant sires, lovingly bring our wreaths of homage to the two
commanders who led the forces of thought and word on to
final victory, pledging ourselves that we will endeavor to carry
forward the standards to highest vantage grounds of truth and
freedom, in the firm belief that “The Truth alone makes Free!”

24
LESSONS FROM THE LIFE AND
WRITINGS OF CHARLES DARWIN.*

Those of us in this room who can think back and look back
through forty years to our school days, can picture great and
startling advances in human discovery and progress. Atlantic
cables that record hourly the sayings and doings of Nations,
electric lighting that turns for us night into day, automatic
printing that in a few hours spreads knowledge broadcast,
spectroscopes that reveal to us the chemical nature of the uni-
verse, electric railroads that make city and country one, tele-
phones that bring to our side friends though hundreds of miles
apart, Roentgen rays that enable us to see through ourselves,
radium that seems to traverse all physical laws, wireless
telegraphy that fills the world with silent messages, aerial
flight with a possible future all its own for man, these and
many others that might be named are discoveries, that have
revolutionized human life within that period.

The one word evolution that is the keynote to our gathering
today, expresses how such discoveries were possible, and could
be made applicable to man. Each and all of them resulted
from slow, laborious and patient questioning of nature, and
often could alone be perfected after some preliminary discovery
or result had been reached. Thus electric lighting and electric
transit could not have been attempted, till Faraday and his fel-
low-laborers had discovered somewhat of the laws of elec-
tricity, and so both were dependent on and evolved from these
previously discovered laws.

 

*Delivered before about 1,700 members of the Philadelphia Girls’
High School, February 15th and 23d, 1909,

25
But the one word, evolution, seems almost insensibly to be
associated in our minds, with that personified word of the
Germans—Darwinismus. Today we have come together, as
common learners at the fountain heads of human knowledge,
to honor the memory of Charles Darwin, who more than any
one man has shown us that evolution is the keynote to the
complicated problems of the world.

Born on the 12th of February, 1809, one hundred years
and three days ago—he died on the 19th of April, 1882. Into
the 70 odd years of his life, he crowded labors, that might have
served well for six notable men. You will naturally ask what
were the surroundings, the persons, the influences, that helped
to mould the man, and what the aspect of the man himself.
In reply I would first ask you to accompany me on an imaginary
journey to London, and there to visit with me South Kensing-
ton Museum, under whose roof I spent profitable days dur-
ing the past summer.

Fittingly and beautifully placed amid green surroundings, it
is one of a set of four far-reaching buildings, that together
make up a worthy monument to the Victorian period of
Britain’s history. The building is a pile of particolored brick,
that is adorned over its recesses, its gargoyles, and its arches
with casts that well represent all manner of “birds and four-
footed beasts and creeping things.” We advance by rising
carriage ways to a central flight of steps, that lands us at the
ample entrance-door.

A glance into the great main hall reveals cases, groups and
large single examples of many animals. But even a moment’s
glance seems irresistibly to carry the eye to a solitary im-
posing marble figure at the far end of the hall, that towers in
its purity above the objects around. Charles Darwin, sage
and seer of the 19th century! You are impatient to reach it,
but the journey thither is instructive. As we enter the hall,
a new central figure looms up almost beside us, cast in dull
but imperishable metal. Richard Owen, skilled anatomist,
persuasive lecturer, originator and director for years of that

26
great building, looks down on us with sharp clean-cut features
and inquisitive eyes.

To our right a marble bust claims attention, that in every
well-known lineament, as so often reproduced in biological
literature, proclaims it to be Thomas Henry Huxley, erudite
zoologist, palaeontologist, lecturer and debater; champion and
knight-errant in the cause of evolution.

We advance along the richly but softly-lighted grand hall,
noting as we pass cases of animals that here illustrate pro-
tective coloration, there mimetic resemblance, and again it may
be crossing or hybridization effects. Now we are rising by
steps to the central marble figure, which stands in guarded re-
pose between the broad diverging stairways that lead to the
upper galleries. A tall, massive, slightly ungainly frame sup-
ports the big head with wrinkled brow, heavy shaggy eye-
brows, soft penetrating eyes, solid nose, wide well-set mouth.
The whole personality seems to breathe massive simplicity,
solid sense, steady effort, deep penetration, cautious esti-
mation and generalization. Such also the man as he was.

We pause on the stair landing in front of the statue, cast our
eyes downward along the floor we have traversed, upward into
the surrounding galleries that we are to reach, and everywhere
we seem to catch the spirit of the two men who face each
other ; Owen below, in hard, dull metal; Darwin above and be-
hind in pure, soft marble. Those great and varied groups of
preserved animals around, seem to breathe the character of the
men. Some remind us of exact anatomical facts patiently
gathered, of hard and fast lines of classification slowly elabor-
ated, and both in the Owen spirit of species discrimination.
Others suggest to us variations amongst individuals of a species,
adaptation that seems to suit each best for its environment,
utility that vindicates and conserves existence, mimicry and
cunning that “pull through on a bluff.” All suggest the Dar-
winian spirit in the interpretation of Nature.

Were we to express a wish, and trust to its fruition for the
future, we would hope that some day within that hall, and in

27
line with the figures of Darwin and of Owen, like memorials
of Lamarck, Wallace and Spencer will stand; that right and
left of these will appear not merely one to Huxley, but similar
tributes to Lyell, Hooker, and to Asa Gray, a national testi-
mony then to international victories won by great marshals
in scientific warfare against the forces of ignorance, bigotry
and exclusiveness.

These great names recall to you the men who, as forerun-
ners. like Buffon and Lamarck, as rivals in renown like
Spencer and Wallace, as willing sympathetic helpers like
Lyell, Hooker, Huxley and Gray, all advanced the evolution
cause by leading up to the personality and work of Charles
Darwin.

Were we to continue our walk together through these halls
and galleries, we might soon accumulate tomes of notes that
might be entitled “Lessons from the Structures and Habits
of Animals.” But I am sure that you are not disappointed
when my subject is announced as “Lessons from the Life and
Writings of Charles Darwin.”

Son and grandson of two eminent and highly scientific medi-
cal men of central England, Charles’ boyhood had as a memory
and an environment, the striking evolutionary speculations of
his grandfather Erasmus, and the cultured discussions of his
father’s hospitable board. His mother was a daughter of
Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter,.a simple man who all
his life never knew defeat in following a high aim. Heredity
counts for much, and it has well been said of Charles that he
inherited his genius, his originality, his love of investigation
of abstruse problems from his father’s side; his patient, stead-
fast, simple habits from his mother’s.

You have all learned in your studies under Dr. Keller and
her able corps of colleagues, how Charles never proved a
prodigy at school—encouragement this to some budding
genius before me mayhap ;—how, even amid kindred Spirits at
Edinburgh University, the teachers and the teachings of Medi-
cine proved unattractive; how an exchange to Cambridge Uni-

28
versity seemed to fulfil the old adage “out of the frying pan
into the fire”; how one sacred friendship there—that with
Professor Henslow—seemed to guide his life almost insensibly
into its proper channel; how the same friendship got for him
the post of Naturalist on the little war ship, the Beagle; how,
for five years in confined quarters and with increasing sense
of sickness, he circumnavigated the world while he toiled lov-
ingly and incessantly as “the dear old philosopher” of his fel-
low voyagers; how that later after a brief, busy six years in
London—still the metropolis of the world—he moved to Down,
a qttiet retreat amid the Kentish downs, near to London, and
yet far from its feverish life. There he settled for forty years,
and so from Down came those exhaustive treatises that have
changed the methods, the trend, and the results of human
thought.

Today we wish to catch some inspiration from this life.
And first we ask, how did he accomplish his manifold results?
His biographers tell us that a motto, culled from the life of an
ordinary English laborer, was his constant incentive. Five
words sum it up. “It?s dogged as does it.’ Not brilliant
genius, not special inherited gift, not a concatenation of luck
and good hits according to his thinking. “It’s dogged as does
it.” And this is but a dialectic and epigrammatic rendering
of Emerson’s words: “The one prudence in life is concentra-
tion, the one evil is dissipation.”

Again his friendships—selected and stimulating—contributed
in no small measure to his successful results. We can scarce-
ly refrain from asking, how could he ever have become a
botanist who published volumes of unrivalled value, without
Hooker to guide, encourage, and enrich; how a geologist who
explained the growth of great chalk masses, of coral reefs past
and present, of extinct groups of animals and their strati-
graphical relation, without Lyell and Falconer to appeal to;
how could he ever have got a fair hearing in his day without
the help of the doughty fighter and dilectician, Huxley; how
candid criticism and botanical side lights from distant fields

20
without Asa Gray to fall back on; how information on widely
apart topics, had his neighbor Lubbock—Lord Avebury—not
been within reach?

We are all aware how often even the closest friendships
have been severed by jealous thoughts coming between. It
refreshes one then to read Darwin’s reply to Wallace soon
after the publication of “Natural Selection” by the latter. “I
have just received your book and read the preface ; there never
has been passed on me, or, indeed, on anyone, a higher eulo-
nium. than yours. I wish I had fully deserved it. Your mod-
esty and candor are very far from new to me. I hope it is a
satisfaction to you to reflect—and very few things in my life
have been more satisfactory to me—that we have never felt
any jealousy toward each other, though in one sense rivals.”

But probably beyond all other naturalists—not even ex-
cepting Linnaeus—his life work and his writings called round
him a phalanx of unseen, silent friends, who contributed will-
ingly some of the most striking facts of his book. Thus
Criiger watching orchids and figs in Central America secured
data regarding their pollination that read like fairy tales.
Fritz Muller, in Brazil, watched and recorded for him the do-
ings of sensitive plants, of related flowers and insects, of
termite ants, of native earthworms, of differently marked deer.
B. D. Walsh, graduate of Cambridge University, pioneer 70
years ago in what was then the western wilderness of this coun-
try, and a minute observer of nature, delighted to turn from
speculations in lumber to describe for Darwin the drumming
of locusts, the relation of gall insects, or the distribution of
wingless ones. Our own Meehan ever recalled with pride and
gratitude, the helpful facts, as well as the diverse and inde-
pendent results, that he was able to send across the ocean.

And not the least noteworthy of Darwin’s friendships was
that for the quiet, sensitive, independent Scotch gardener, John
Scott, whom he encouraged, praised, pushed forward and
mourned for, when a too early death cut short his career in

30
India. The original but cautious observations of the young
aspirant were fully appreciated by the trained veteran.

Freedom of the body and freedom of the mind were for
Darwin the inalienable rights of man, as against bondage and
oppression of every form. Nowhere does his abhorrence of
enslaving the body come out more strongly, than when as a
young man he touched at some South American port. That
little descriptive glimpse where he tells of his whole moral na-
ture being aroused at sight of a negro cowering abjectly under
the threatened stroke of his master, and of his wonder being
excited that even a slave would so cower, reveals to us his
sympathies, but also his still very imperfect evolutionary views,
for that negro, like so many plants and other animals, had
learned by experience that to bend before the storm is often
surer safety, than to court and brave it.

The voyage of the Beagle was contemporaneous with the
agitation in Britain for abolition of colonial slavery. Dar-
win patriotically wrote “What a proud thing for England, if
she is the first European nation which utterly abolishes it.”
And again he says “Hurrah for the honest Whigs! I trust
they will attack that monstrous stain on our boasted liberty,
Colonial Slavery. I have seen enough of slavery and the dis-
position of the negroes, to be thoroughly disgusted at the lies
and nonsense one hears on the subject in England.” It is
pleasant to reflect that that voyage, which was the seed time
for mental freedom to the world, was also the period when
Britain did proclaim “liberty to the captive.”

In later years when the great crisis on the slavery question
had been reached in this country, when simultaneously the
“Origin of Species” had been vilified by bishops and even
Whig reformers, the great seer still held his way as a moral
regenerator. In 1861 he writes to Gray: “I have not seen or
heard of a soul who is not with the North. Some few, and
I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of
millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade
against slavery.”

31
But freedom of the mind is a priceless possession, even to
the humblest thinker. Often it has occurred to me that Dar-
win was blessed in having the wealth that gave him independ-
ence, even though to many this might have been a serious
temptation. He could work quietly at Down after publication
of “The Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man,” un-
dismayed by the conflicting tempests of human thought that
found expression by word and pen. Had he been some poor
teacher, a faculty, a president, or a board of trustees, might
have voted to “have him removed.” This boon of independ-
ence that came by fortune to Darwin, he welcomed in his cor-
respondents, so that in the case of John Scott, one of his
qualifications in Darwin’s eyes was, that he was not afraid to
differ and maintain opposite views.

As we sweep back in thought over Darwin’s career
the feeling grows that the achieving life is often a life of
sacrifice. One of the cheap and catching expressions of our
day is “I hope you will have a good time.” And “good time”
too often stands for wasted time, extravagant habits, luxurious
living. All his life through he could have had just such a
good time, while, during a part of his university career, he ac-
knowledges that he dipped into its edge. But heredity, and the
environment of good friendships, saved him for a life of noble
toil and sacrifice.

As he starts on his voyage around the world he honestly
confesses that love of country, home and kindred, all incline
him to stay. He speaks of the hardships and the risks, but
finally exclaims “there is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of man,
and I have experienced it.” So he entered on his first great
life work, determined to carry it to a successful issue. The
close, confined quarters, and the ever-recurring seasickness,
might have soon conquered less brave spirits than he, but
through five years of it he struggled on, achieving greatly
through steady sacrifice.

His return to London might have marked the beginning of
a life of ease as well as honor, but he marked out instead a

32
path of earnest, unceasing effort to explain natural phenomena.
So in the midst of almost constant sickness, he strove daily to
accomplish an allotted task, which was only made more per-
sistent and systematized when he migrated to Down. Thus
against what to many would have been fearful odds he ac-
cumulated the facts for his works on “Coral Islands,” on
“Barnacle Shells,” on the “Origin of Species,” and those still
later productions of his genius, but equally of his unremitting
toil, that together constitute his best and lasting memorials.
In all of this, achievement by sacrifice was his lot; for he al-
most sadly confesses that his early taste for poetry, his delight
in literature of different forms, his pleasure in viewing works
of art, became dulled to greater or less degree, as his brain
gradually became a calculating, reflecting, synthetic machine
that was grinding out the principles of the organic world. One
has said: “Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty.”
As well may it be said: “Eternal sacrifice is the price we pay
for advance in knowledge.”

Few men, in the pursuit of a high ideal—of truth
itseli—have had to endure more sneers, misrepresentation and
calummies than Darwin. Fortunately he lived in days and
amid surroundings that ensured freedom of body, so that the
fate of a Galileo was saved him. But freedom of the mind
was what he alone claimed. So long as he published suggest-
ive accounts of travel, observations and deduced generaliza-
tions on coral islands, or intricate studies on acorn shells, the
great public cared little. The privileged classes of educated
ones, who regarded themselves as the autocrats and arbiters
of all philosophic thought, of human origin and destiny, of
all Christian charity mayhap, were immediately aroused when
the “Origin of Species” appeared in 1859, the “Variations of
Plants and Animals” in 1869, and “The Descent of Man” in
1871. For did not each of these laborious and fruitful works
lay before mankind a body of natural facts, which each in-
dividual was asked to study, to verify, and to accept or reject.

33
Reason, truth and judgment were appealed to, not legend,
dogma, or undemonstrable statements.

Slowly but steadily the thinking masses of mankind—now
no longer held in ignorance, but becoming enlightened in-
dividuals by that widespread education that this country first
demanded and first established for its citizens—accepted the
fundamental truths of evolution, while it is safe to say that half
a million of his volumes have permeated the mental recesses
of mankind. Huxley’s tribute in “Nature” was correct.
“None have fought better and none have been more fortunate
than Charles Darwin. He found a great truth, trodden under
foot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived
long enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragibly
established in science, inseparably incorporated with the com-
mon thoughts of men, and only hated and feared by those who
would revile but dare not. What shall a man desire more than
this.”

It is sad to reflect that the brilliant and far-seeing Lamarck
died, without seeing any interest in his doctrines excited
amongst the masses of mankind. With Darwin it fortunately
was different. In a letter to Hooker he said regarding a book
he had just read, “With a book as with a fine day, one likes
to end it with a glorious sunset.” Such was the career of Dar-
win’s books, if by “glorious sunset” we interpret general pub-
lic acceptance. And if we carry the simile further by remem-
bering, that sunset to one land is but fuller light or dawning to
others, and thus in time the lighting up of the world, so already
his books translated into many tongues are shedding intellect-
ual light and truth throughout the world.

So far the man, let us try now briefly to gather some les-
sons from his writings.

Darwin supremely taught us by these writings that in ac-
cumulating biological facts the world must be our field, if true
knowledge is to be advanced. A philosopher in this country,
of world-wide renown, exclaimed: “My country is the world,
and to do good is my religion.” The true naturalist of today

34
must claim an equally wide field. Make a survey of the text-
books, manuals, memoirs and reports alike in botany and zo-
ology of the past fifty years. The remarkable conclusion must
be accepted that no country and no clime now fetters the Nat-
uralist, who gathers his material, his observations, his con-
clusions, from the ends of the earth. This is unquestionably
one result, and a very important one—of the Darwin epoch.

To ransack Nature Sars and Wyville Thompson sailed forth
over the high seas from 1870 to 1880, and explored its greatest
depths, till all culminated in the colossal “Challenger Reports.”
Dohrn, Agassiz, Lacaze, Bonnier, Flahault and Treub have
developed stations where plants and animals could be studied
at first hand, and such stations in our own and other lands, are
now dotted abundantly, and are honorably—though not always
liberally—supported by governments, societies and laymen.
Our text-books and class-books, that up to 1860 or 1870 were
largely charged with local references, now treat of and draw
lessons from plants the world over. The old spirit even that
would so restrict these has largely gone.

In this connection, let me claim without fear of challenge, that
in botanic gardens, as in other matters botanical, Darwin’s
reiterated assertion that botany was quite abreast of the other
natural sciences in exact yet broad and liberal lines, is amply
borne out, for during the past two centuries at least, our
botanic gardens have been filled with international collections:
of plants. Today also our institutions do not hesitate to con-
duct or to send individuals or parties 1,000 to 10,000 miles, in
search of material that they may collect or even study on the
spot, if thereby botanical or zoological science is to be ad-
vanced. Evolutionary views of communication have an-
nihilated space.

The memories already recalled of Darwin’s common friend-
ships, present continuously the lesson that has often seemed
to the writer to be the most far-reaching legacy in his writings.
We might express it in the few words “He showed the power
of little things.’ How many naturalists before him would

35
have cared to inquire of an unseen friend in Brazil what earth-
worms were there doing for the soil, or from one in Edin-
burgh, what value and history one small muscle might have in
the human frame. But it is when he records some direct ob-
servation that he excels. A correspondent sent him an orchid
capsule, and he did not regard the time to be lost in counting the
light seeds, though these summed up millions. For did he not
thus reach the wise conclusion, since elaborated so well by his
“rival” Wallace, that thus many species of plants may have been
disseminated over hundreds of miles within a few hours. The
observation might seem microscopic and trivial, that the
flowers on one plant of Primrose or Quaker Lady matured
smaller pollen grains than another. But such formed a deter-
mining factor in the life or death of the species. It might seem
an idle thing to keep little seeds of many plant species in dishes
of salt water. But this would determine whether or not these
could safely be washed across inlet or ocean stretches, and yet
survive to germinate. The tentacles of Drosera—the common
flycatcher—are classic through all time, since they enabled
him to prove that a weight 1/78,740 of a grain, when
cautiously applied, will cause inbending of the tentacle, and
so prove that plant perception may far excel that of most
animals.

We can well understand then, when on the trail for such
startling results, that his enthusiasm at times became supreme,
and caused him to exclaim at the close of a very sane note to
a friend, requesting some blooms of a plant ‘‘For the sake of
heaven and all the saints, send me a few in a tin box with damp
moss. Your insane friend, Charles Darwin.”

Each year, decade or century witnesses the origin or popular-
izing of some word. “Environment?” and “environmental ac-
tion” are now cumbrous but commonplace expressions. They
may well be called words of the past evolutionary century. La-
marck, earnest forerunner and anticipator for many thoughts
of Darwin, made the words—essentially French—somewhat
familiar a century ago. In his extended travels as a tutor, and

36
in his reflections during maturer years on the origin of species,
he became increasingly impressed with “environment’—the
sum-total of surroundings—as a leading, or perhaps the Jead-
ing, factor in organic evolution. Sun, air, wind, water, snow,
frost, soil as well as other organisms, all made up an environ-
ment for each plant or animal that acted on it, and to which
it reacted. If, said he, these surrounding agents become chang-
ed so will the organisms change.

Therefore we strive to enrich and cultivate our crops; to
feed and shelter our domestic animals; to feed, shelter and edu-
cate—let us hope—our fellows whether of low or high de-
gree; thereby trusting—let us rather say, knowing—that each
succeeding race of plants, of animals, of mankind around us,
will be moulded and by slow degree evolved on a higher plane.
The highest and best environment will produce the highest
and best type of organism.

Resulting from the above, and working continuously with
it, we glance next at a far-reaching principle of the organic
world, that might be summed up in four portentous words,
“use conserves, disuse destroys.” Try to escape it as we may,
or as we would prefer to, this rings out as a never dying re-
frain. Darwin constantly referred to it, it is one of the key-
stones for Spencer’s system. Wallace wrote “the principle of
utility, which is one of Natural Selection’s chief foundation
stones, I have always advocated unreservedly.”

Take the suggestive group of native eastern Gerardias, that
have all adopted a slightly or pronounced parasitic habit. This
habit with plants as with animals, always leads to simplification,
reduction, degeneration, lazy dependence, ultimate death from
the increased vissicitudes, uncertainties, and disuse relations.
Our northern Gerardias have a luxuriant root system, only a
few of the root extremities end in parasitic suckers that pene-
trate roots of a few host plants around, their stems and
branches are luxuriant and the leaves are abundant as well as
green and actively vegetative. But as we journey toward the
Gulf Coast we gradually encounter species with reduced soil

37
growth, relatively more abundant parasitic suckers, condensed:
and sparse stem and branches with small, narrow leaves, until
in Gerardia aphylla—name well earned—leaves are disappear-
ing remnants and the whole plant is a gaunt, twiggy mass, that
proclaims simplification over its whole person. Relatively a
little green chlorophyll is still left to carry on limited food for-
mation, but the increased parasitic habit has resulted in dis-
use and disappearance of most of it. And what are our tawny
or bleached out Beach-drops, pale Broom-rape and Caneer root
species, but members of the same group—unfortunately and
needlessly segregated by many botanists into a separate family
—that have branched off into more degraded parasitism, that
has resulted in ultimate total disuse and disappearance of the
chlorophyll, with degeneration of each plant to little more than
a flower mass above ground.

Contrariwise also the intricate and complicated mechanism
that we call a tree trunk, represents ages of selective action,
co-operating with increasing use development, in response to
environmental stimuli.

The use and disuse relation in flower parts is often exact,
and alone enables us easily to get a true explanation of the
meaning and structure of the flower.

As our last lesson we may emphasize that all of Darwin’s
writings seem constantly to proclaim that “everything has a
meaning.’ Or to state it more fully, every organism and every
minutest part of an organism has developed historically in an
explainable manner. You all know of the peg on the young
shoot of the squash seedling, of its use, and of how like the
beneficent angel of story having fulfilled its mission it shuns
to proclaim its good deeds by fading away. Many of you have
studied the pansy flower with its variously colored petals, its
delicate guiding lines that converge to the flower’s mouth, its
lateral hair patches on the petals, its nectar spur, its two nectar
secreters, its pollen box and its cup-shaped stigma. All have
a meaning, and all are parts of a correlated whole.

Even to linger for a little on a different phase of the story,

38
we hear much now-adays of disappearing rudiments, of ves-
tigial remnants, of useless organs, of appendicitis. We will
not ask the medical men for an illustration and explana-
tion. We can dissect the large bright flowers of our Garden
Sage, the smaller blue flowers of our native one, and the bloom
of a Lavender or Rosemary. We note the presence in the
sages of two perfect fertile stamens, also of two tiny “drum-
sticks” that only cautious dissection of the blooms reveal. But
these with the other two are perfect and fertile in the lavender.
So we name the “drum-sticks” vestigial remnants, of an
earlier and more primitive stage, that even now is typical of the
family, in which all four are still fertile, useful and well de-
veloped. They have become increasingly reduced and super-
fluous in the Sages and Bergamots, as being hindrances to the
free movements of insect visitors. With increasing disuse has
come decreasing development.

In like manner the disappearing petals of the White Maple,
the disappearing foliage leaves of Asparagus, the disappearing
flower-stalks of clover, have all an exact meaning on exact
evolutionary lines.

If now, in closing this brief and very imperfect picture of
what we owe to Darwin and his associates, we try to conjure
up the sum-total of the interactions that most organisms are
the arena for in this changing world, a deeply significant and
marvellously inter-related scene comes before us. Writers
like Seton Thompson have presented to us in graphic—often
tragic—outlines the life of some special animals. Such may, at
times, seem forced and overdrawn. But whether it be an oak
tree, a sensitive plant, a dog or man, could we reach, so to
speak, their innermost organic heart, and feel the surgings of
inorganic and organic molecules there, as forces around at one
moment—like sunshine, shower or warmth—seemed to draw
out and help them; at another—like frost winds, parching suns
and destructive living agents—seemed to wither or destroy,
such organisms would not be organisms if they did not respond
in according manner, and show altered personality. The de-

39
scendants, if not at first, at least in later generations, will we
believe change, and hereditarily acquire the new features or
altered personality of the parents. So the minute and imper-
ceptible actions and reactions become in time the acquired, the
evident, the hereditary.

Some such is the biological procession of events that pres-
ent-day evolutionary knowledge brings before us. Need we
say that as we advance in our attempted study of such pro-
cessions—such biographies—constant difficulties face us, and
our own ignorance weighs us down. Our continuous cry
therefore—hidden or expressed—is with the old philosopher
“Light! Light! more Light.”

So the limits of discovery in organic science seem for man
to know no end. But in looking back on the past, and trying
to forecast the future, we venture to assert that, as the years
speed by Buffon, Lamarck, Spencer, Wallace and Darwin
will be enshrined as the Fathers of Evolutionary Biology.
But of the five, Charles Darwin, for simplicity of life and char-
acter, for patient sustained labor in midst of suffering, for
far-reaching and correct perception of truth, for endurance
of scorn and criticism that truth might be advanced, will stand
out as the commanding figure who kept his soul in peace, and
when death came laid down his life-work, content in the
thought that others would carry it forward.

Thus we view his completed life-work with deep satisfaction,
and if we now recall, under slightly modified form his
words “With a life as with a fine day, one likes to end it with
a glorious sunset,’ we bow our heads in humble gratitude and
exclaim “Thy wish, Charles Darwin. seer of the past, prophet
for the future, has had completed fulfilment.”

40
THE LEGACY LEFT US BY DARWIN AND
HIS COLLABORATORS.*

I am deeply sensible of the honor your society has done me,
in asking me, through your Jearned member, Professor
Schiedt, to speak now on the naturalist and philosopher,
Charles Darwin. My sense of high responsibility is coupled
with the grateful remembrance, that I can regard him as a
fellow countryman; as one who—like his father and grand-
father before him—was student in a common Alma Mater,
Edinburgh University; as an illustrious discoverer in my
chosen field of Natural Science ; and as the man who had open-
ed wide vistas of biological study to our student-day eyes,
vistas these that have ever lengthened with the passing years.

Student days always recall fond memories, and they again
insensibly lead us back to pre-student enthusiasms and hopes.
So there rises before me the picture of a group of lads in my
native town, sixteen to twenty years old, who were striving
to reach out, even to the most momentous and intricate ques-
tions of the universe. It is appropriate that youthful hopes and
youthful wisdom go hand in hand, for in time the increase in
the latter helps to decrease the former, and so life’s mean is
struck though it may be after many years.

But wisdom after all, like each phenomenon of this world, is
a relative quantity. So every one of our score or thereby of
young aspirants to knowledge, entered with hearty good will
into the exercises of our “Mutual Improvement Society.” And

 

*Delivered before the Linnean Society, the Faculty and Students of
Franklin and Marshall College, and Citizens of Lancaster, Pa., Febru-
ary 27th, 1909.

41
our young lives had been flung forth into the world’s arena
at an epoch-making age. For had not “The Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation” stirred deepest thoughts and ap-
prehensions in parental minds; had not Spencer’s “Social
Statics” been read and pondered by our elders for twenty years ;
had not “The Origin of Species” seemed to upset all tradi-
tions; had not “The Descent of Man” but recently appeared,
and called forth magazine articles that we followed with avid-
ity, if not always with appreciation? The debates in that little
Society, for and against evolution, often waxed hot and elo-
quent, were supposedly settled by vote of the assembled mem-
bers before each meeting broke up, but anew were reopened as
we scattered to our homes, and scarcely were they settled
when our heads settled on our pillows for the night.

Later years at College only served to emphasize the fer-
ment that was working in the human mind. For while the
genial and able Wyville Thompson had left his classes, to con-
duct scientifically the “Challenger” expedition round the
world, his place had been taken temporarily by Huxley, whose
long raven hair in heavy locks, broad-spread nose, searching.
eyes, set mouth and mellow fluent “catching” diction all
“caught” the students. Little wonder was it then that on Sir
Wyville’s triumphant return, with the treasures of a world’s
ocean-depths in his keeping, even he failed to recapture the
errant ones, nay rather had in time to follow his young inex-
perienced but wayward flock in their evolutionary wanderings.

During the nine hours of the college day, we might stray
into one class room to hear diatribes against all who would even
suggest that species were mutable, into another where a young-
er teacher would hail “Darwinism” as the new scientific sal-
vation, into still another where gentle sarcasm was heaped on
all Darwinian followers. But the new creed had come to stay
for us, and therefore we at one time ran, at another time
stumbled on, and failing either, groped forward where we
could not see to follow.

You will pardon these personal reminiscences when i say,

42
that they represented the average university as well as lay atti-
tude, toward evolutionary teachings, from 1860 to 1880.

Today how great is the contrast! During the past weeks
and months, as well as in those that are to come, an international
tribute to the genius of Darwin, and so of all associated with
him in building up the great doctrine of evolution, has been
and will be offered, that will probably remain unequaled: in
the history of any one man. This evening we have gathered
to attest our interest in the man, in the cause, and in the issues
of that cause for humanity. Therefore it is that I have chosen
to speak on “The Legacy Left us by Darwin and His Col-
laborators.”

In family or in social affairs, a legacy may represent
varied interests or commodities; land, houses, money, jewels,
or special investments amongst others. Not less varied is the
evolutionary legacy. Contrast the material, the mental, the
moral, the spiritual horizons of 1859, when “The Origin of
Species” appeared, with those now surrounding us a half cen-
tury later. We would at once boldly assert that the advance
has been remarkable. But we would also suggest that in some
relations stagnation or retrogression has occurred.

In the material and the mental, a progressive evolution has
been effected, whose magnitude we often scarcely estimate
aright, because we live amid its highest results. The material
advance is due to that happy combination of manifold dis-
coveries in pure chemistry and physics, with direct applica-
tion of these in the arts and sciences, so as to increase human
well-being and human wealth. But in part, at least, this ad-
vance has resulted from a correlated, orderly, scientific mode
of approaching these subjects, which may well be called the
evolutionary method; or in other words, observation, analysis,
synthesis and deduction have gone hand in hand. The in-
ventors of earliest days had it, but to them it was a happy and
often haphazard combination, not an accepted rule of conduct
as now.

As regards mental relations and viewpoints the change has

43
been phenomenal. In 1859 living things, and man himself,
were regarded as separate entities, each species being blocked
off by hard and fast lines from others of more or less near
affinity. ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man” had been so
dwelt on and hackneyed, that knowledge of the mental atti-
tudes of lower animals was scant and erratic in the extreme,
while plants were viewed as living things only in a distant
sense, and as mainly worthy of study from their economic re-
lations, or as ministering to man’s sense of the beautiful. Ab-
stract philosophy, classical linguistics, and mathematics held
the field, but only in occasional cases held the men who thought
of a University course. Medical science alone practiced true
methods of study—though in rather imperfect manner,—and
had sheltered under its protective wing Botany and Zoology,
the two great sciences of which Medicine was only and is now
a very limited department. Naturalists were almost wholly
engaged in classification efforts, while morphologists and phy-
siologists were making strong but restricted efforts to expand.
Finally the Church, of every sect, denomination, creed or con-
nection, required implicit trust in its tenets, no matter how
it viewed problems of life or of human development. Each
individual was thus made a link in a system of thinking, acting,
speaking, that gave small opportunity for individual opinion,
and still smaller scope for the expression by individuals of new
and wide views concerning cosmic origin or modification.

The changed result of today, while powerfully heralded by
Lamarck, was begun when Lyell published his “Principles of
Geology” in 1833, Chambers his “Vestiges of Creation” in
1844, Spencer his “Principles of Psychology” and “Principles
of Biology” from 1855 to 1866, and Darwin his “Origin of
Species” in 1859. Such works, published almost within a
quarter of a century, and each viewing cosmic and biologic
phenomena from standpoints as different as were their authors
in personal characteristics, could not fail to awaken wide in-
terest in the minds of the laity, and did not fail to excite hostile
demonstration in every section of the church.

44
The rapid spread and acceptance of many of the more pro-
nounced views amongst thinking people, and even by minds like
those of Kingsley, Maurice, Tennyson and Fiske, soon indicated
the trend of events, though one may say that it was a return
to, and homage paid to, the prophetic scientific insight of the
poet Goethe. But the mental and hereditary convictions of
centuries could not readily be thrown aside, unless by abundant
illustration and proof drawn from every source. In furnishing
this through full forty years of patient labor, Charles Darwin
towered head and shoulders above his most illustrious com-
peers. While we regard it as proved tlrat some xf the widest
generalizations to which he attached prime . © %rtance—as
for example, natural selection—pale in fundamental value be-
fore Lamarck’s environmental or direct variation factor, it
nevertheless remains true that the sum total of his recon-
structive work caused us to view, not merely plants and
animals, but all scientific questions from an altered standpoint.
And so we justly honor him today with richest homage.

Throughout this period of mental stress and strain, we can
clearly recognize three groups of collaborators, who may be
said to have worked on three successively ascending planes
of evolutionary action, that carry us from the evolving in-
organic and organic planes, to the higher and more humanistic
realms of morals and religion.

First Darwin, as well as his co-worker and henchman, Hux-
ley, resembled Lamarck in that they so largely concentrated
attention on organic evolution, up to the stage of man’s com-
mencing civilization, that they largely laid aside any serious
attempt to estimate man from his moral and religious side.
True, Darwin in his “Descent of Man” touched questions of
deepest import, and at times followed them to a high plane;
while Huxley in some of his later essays, even carried the
stage further. Darwin’s final position on questions of religion
is quite correctly summed up by him in 1876. “The mystery
of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for
one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” This is the at-

45
titude of a humble learner, whose knowledge is as nothing
alongside the unfathomed truths of the Universe. It is also,
as his son and biographer clearly points out, in striking con-
trast to the avowed atheist’s ‘“I-know-everything” attitude,
that is as unscientific as it is withering to further investiga-
tion.

It is wholly due to this last attitude, that many during the
past half century have resolved by word and action to abide
on the plane of the present and the past, of man’s history, in-
stead of attempting to reach out to a higher and a nobler ideal.
Stagnation and degeneration are ever present results, in the
life history of every organism, if the environment be created
that will favor their progress. So we believe that in some cases
the past half century has brought individual retrogression.

But secondly, during the period under review, three other
minds—not to mention additional contributory ones,—were
active, and two especially were attempting far wider incur-
sions into the evolutionary field of the world. Herbert
Spencer, Alfred R. Wallace and Earnest Haeckel, availed
themselves gladly of the teachings of Lamarck and of Darwin,
while the first and last pushed their studies back to the origin,
constitution and motions of. unicellular organisms, of the
molecules of which these consisted, of the energy and the mat-
ter that were invariably correlated in the molecules, and even
in the case of the first and last named, they have attempted to
reach the great first causes of the world or of the universe.
All three moreover have striven to picture or to follow man’s
evolution to still higher planes of perfection. So Herbert
Spencer, in his “Principles” of Biology, of Psychology, of
Sociology and of Ethics, constrticted a system that if not sound
in all of its generalizations, is at least imposing in its magni-
tude.

Wallace, soon after publication of the “Descent of Man”
diverged in friendly spirit from some of Darwin’s conclu-
sions. Reflecting on man’s marked superiority over the high-
est apes, he could not accept it that continuous evolutionary

46
adaptation and selection had produced such a result; rather
that by some discontinuous process high mental endowment
‘had resulted that made him in very deed “Lord of Creation.”
In line with this he has since been a constant advocate for the
rights, the improvement, and the peace of mankind, by social-
istic or co-operative effort. Even though in his advocacy of
spiritualism, we may join with many in saying “not proven,”
our profound ignorance of many unseen forces should cause us
to welcome him as an investigator in that field, until its scien-
tific value has been proved or disproved.

But of the three, Haeckel, brilliant though steady, daring
yet to some degree cautious, generalizing stupendously though
busy analytically, from 1865 up to our own day, has swept the
gamut of speculation and deduction in a sublime—some might
say in a rash—manner. No one can read his Altenburg address
of 1892 on Monism, without being impressed by the deter-
mined earnestness, the eloquent presentation, the lofty aspira-
tion, and the almost prophetic faith that animate the whole,
and that bind together its sentences. Those closing words are
impressive “In the hope that the defence and promotion of
these may still be continued, I conclude my monistic Confes-
sion of Faith with the words: ‘May God the Spirit of the
Good, the Beautiful, and the True, be with us.’ ”

The latter part of the past half century has produced a third
group of investigators, who have fully realized the value and
applicability of evolution to man, as to the rest of the organic
world, but who have been profoundly impressed by the re-
ligious factor in man’s recent and highest progress. They have
largely shared the fate of those who try to reconcile opposing
forces. For it is safe to say that Drummond, Kidd and
Chamberlain have been viewed with mistrust and suspicion
by the Church, at the same time that they have been severely
left alone by most biologists.

All three have presented facts of suggestive value, they have
largely disentangled themselves from dogma and unverifiable
assertions, they have tried to view man in process of evolution

47
during recent millenia, and have tried to forecast his continued
evolution to higher planes. Their volumes are stimulating,
elevating, original, yet, though they have been widely read and
reflected on, they seem as yet to have failed in reaching a
suitable niche within evolution’s mental temple. We need not
stay to ask whether this is the fault of the men, of their views,
or of scientific opinion in relation to these.

In what follows it will be our endeavor to try to estimate the
methods, the aims, and the accomplishments, of the three
groups of men thus briefly outlined.

Charles Darwin belonged to the first of the three, but he oc-
cupies pre-eminent and unquestioned position. Spencer had
already outlined, in thought at least, many of his subsequent
volumes when “The Origin of Species” appeared ; but he glad-
ly testified that Darwin had been his great illuminator. Even
though, as by Huxley and Haeckel, increasing prominence
was given by some to environment, with resulting direct or
exact variation, as a factor that at least equaled or excelled
Natural Selection in importance, the position of Darwin has
not been questioned and needs no vindication. This is due
we believe in large measure to the following causes.

First, during his entire public career of exactly half a cen-
tury (1831-1881), he was a continuous, devoted, and simple
minded observer and interpreter of Nature in its widest as-
pects. He lived John Burroughs’ verses:

I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace;
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.

The stars come nightly to the sky,
The tidal wave unto the sea,

Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.

This sentiment is re-echoed with fervid enthusiasm by Haeckel,

48
in the closing chapters of his “Riddle of the Universe” as be-
ing the only pathway to truth and knowledge. Neatly also
the “Times” wrote, on the day that Darwin was carried to West-
minster: “He thought, and his thoughts have passed into the
substance of facts of the universe. A grass plot, a plant in
bloom, a human gesture, the entire circle of the doings and
tendencies of Nature, builds his monument and records his ex-
ploits.” The secluded quietness of Down became for forty
years his focal center for such “Nature Study.” But a spirit
like his could not be chained by time or place, and so the plant
and animal surroundings of his summer homes, Kew or Edin-
burgh Botanic Gardens, the nurseries of England, the fields
and forests of the United States and Brazil as seen through
the eyes of two of his unseen friends, the Gardens and the
Mountains of the European mainland were all laid under
tribute.

In such observings he retained to a marked degree the open
unbiased mind, though he naively confesses that, like all of
us, he at times inclined to allow his preconceived notions—his
dogmatics—to run ahead of his judgment. Witness his con-
fession of how, on first reflection, he deemed it unnecesary for
the Venus Flytrap leaf to close its spikes rather loosely after
first contraction, and to tighten up by degrees, but how Nature
caused him to reverse his judgment after continued watching.
His books abound with such illustrations.

In common with his collaborators, he rightly revolted against
the view that man alone possesses all the superior gifts of
mind and reason. Thus in a letter of 1860 to Asa Gray he
says: “The coolness with which” the reviewer “makes all
animals to be destitute of reason is simply absurd.” In this
connection he was probably the first naturalist who showed the
essentially degraded, narrow and egotistic attitude that man
had taken to natural objects below him. It was eminently ap-
propriate then, that he should have demonstrated how even
the poet in his flight of fancy, had erred in exclaiming “Full
many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness

49
on the desert air,” when the discriminating eye of discriminat-
ing insects had so often flitted around these, ages before man’s
appearance on earth, and that beneficent results should there-
by have come alike to flowers and insects.

A second and equally noteworthy quality was his method of
acquiring facts. Even had he only lived to teach mankind
this, he would well have deserved the appellation “The Inter-
preter of Nature.” Take any one of his dynamic works, in
which he carries us stage by stage through the history of a
large related group. Take for example his “Climbing Plants.”
Note how at one time he gathers great bodies of observed
facts that suggest some movements in common, as well as
peculiarities in these movements that differ. Note how he
experiments by retarding the motion at one time, by reversing
it at another, by making environmental agents like too thick a
stick prove a hindrance rather than a help to upward climb-
ing. Proceeding thus, he accumulates observations and experi-
ments that become simultaneously indicative, cross question-
ing, and excluding. By the exercise of that process which
Haeckel in his “Wonders of Life” has well expressed as “a
preponderant tendency to, and capacity for, a comprehensive
perception of the universal in particulars,’ and which he has
well remarked is combined with the above analytical capacity
“only in natural philosophers of the first rank,” Darwin then
proceeds to deduce fundamental principles that enable us to
perceive how widespread is the phenomenon of revolv-
ing motion, and even that this may be an evolved and modi-
fied expression of simpler swaying from side to side.

Similar accumulation of evidence, sifting of it, turning over
even of a piece that may seem doubtfully to deserve a place in
the mental rubbish pile, but that possibly has some truth in it,
the massing of the whole into a great body of evidence, and
the deduction therefrom of some far-reaching principle or
law, characterize his “Insectivorous Plants,” his “Forms of
Flowers” and other works, but find highest expression in his
largest and most celebrated publications.

50
We claim it therefore as one of his pre-eminent merits, that
he has taught two generations of workers, in various fields of
natural science, to garner and to marshal facts that will un-
ravel many of the most complicated inter-relations of plant
and animal life. Even where such results have weakened
some of his conclusions, or have favored evolutionary develop-
ments that he viewed with doubt, he it was who taught the
best methods by which such might be attained. Thus the
studies of Lesage and Lothelier on the direct action of en-
vironment, in bringing about fundamental changes in the tis-
sues even of the first generation of plants experimented with,
formed a welcome and exact confirmation of the truth of La-
marck’s teachings. The two experimenters followed the Dar-
winian method to verify Lamarckian results. Similarly,
and in recent years, the patient, far-reaching experi-
ments, observations and deductions of DeVries on the
evening primroses, have been reached by the exercise of
like methods. For as one stands amid the many demarcated
and carefully guarded plots in the Amsterdam Botanic Gar-
den, one vividly realizes that it is a descendant, so to say, of
that at Down, where Darwin spent so many hours of his out-
door life.

Another legacy that we owe in large measure to Darwin is,
that even the most startling and unlooked for combinations
may occur in Nature. Here it should be said that Darwin
had two forerunners, alike in method and in interpretation
whose greatness has only been properly gaged within the past
half century. The Swiss naturalists, Huber, lived amid their
bees and ants. The son especially watched the ants so closely,
lived in the fields or on the hill-sides amongst them, and so
truthfully interpreted their life relations, that his little book
reads like a fairy tale. But his facts were largely laughed at
by the wise ones of his day. The writer well remembers, as a
young man, asking for the book at the Library of his Alma
Mater. A little faded volume was brought, that the librarian
wiped and beat the dust from, while he remarked as he hand-

51
ed it “that at least has not been a popular book.” Today we
honor the observer as well as his accurate observations and de-
ductions. Darwin utilized Huber’s wisdom to the utmost, and
turned to the ant for information. But in a letter he reveals
how even he could scarcely outlive the narrow man-centered
views of Nature. He says “I have just forwarded two most
extraordinary letters to Busk, from a backwoodsman in Texas
who has evidently watched ants carefully, and declares most
positively that they plant and cultivate a kind of grass for store
food, and plant other bushes for shelter! I do not know what
to think, except that the old gentleman is not fibbing inten-
tionally.” Darwin lived to accept this as fact, while the more
wonderful culture of food-fungi by the ants amid decaying
leaves, as patiently traced by Moller in Brazil, carries the won-
der almost to a human plane of reasoning.

But though the above constitute valuable legacies from
Darwin, the great laws that he so skillfully traced out and
elaborated, are a lasting monument. The final placing on a
satisfactory footing of the law of Variation; the application to
all organisms of the great Malthusian law of Selective Sur-
vival; the far reaching application of his law that “Nature
abhors perpetual self-fertilization”; his contributions to hy-
bridization, to geographical distribution, to digestive action,
to intercellular propagation of stimulus, to irritable move-
ments in plants, to coloration relations in plants and animals,
as well as many other branches of study, are as varied and
valuable as were the fields wide, in which these studies were
collected.

That he effected reconciliations and joined groups of work-
ers hand in hand, who formerly were isolated, has been ex-
quisitely worded by my departed friend, Dr. Maxwell Masters,
who says: “Let any one who knows what was the state of
Botany in this country even so recently as fifteen or twenty
years ago, compare the feeling between Botanists and Horti-
culturists at that time with what it is now. What sympathy
had the one for the pursuits of the other. The Botanist looked
down on the varieties, the races, and strains, raised with so
much pride by the patient skill of the florist, as on things un-
worthy of his notice and study. The horticulturist, on his side,
knowing how very imperfectly plants could be studied from
the mummified specimens in Herbaria, which then constituted
in most cases all the material that the botanist of this country
considered necessary for the study of plants, naturally looked
on the botanist somewhat in the light of a laborious trifler.
Both classes carried on their investigations in a narrow spirit
of isolation, unconscious of or unheedful of the assistance that
either might give to the other.

The investigations of Gaertner, of Kolreuter, of Sprengel,
of Vaucher, had been allowed to remain by British naturalists
as so many dead letters. It was a chance if a page or two were
devoted to them in text-books; rarely if ever were they men-
tioned in lectures, still more rarely was their bearing on horti-
culture alluded to.

Darwin, by his renewal and extension of these experiments,
and especially by his deductions from them, altered alli this.
He made the dry bones live; he invested plants and animals
with a history, a biography, a genealogy, which at once con-
ferred an interest and a dignity on them. Before, they were
as the stuffed skin of a beast in the glass case of a museum;
now they are living beings, each in their degree affected by the
same circumstances that affect ourselves, and swayed, mutatis
mutandis, by like feelings and like passions.”

But it is unquestionably true that Darwin never realized
how far-reaching, how precise, how rapid in action, and how
varied are the forces of environment, nor how exactly or-
ganisms often respond if environmental change be made. His
candor and love of the truth would have led him willingly to
accept it, we believe, as new years brought added and diverse
evidence.

Like all preceding naturalists of philosophic mind, he was
deeply impressed by heredity as witnessed in the unending
procession of plants and animals. They might migrate, they

A

f
53
might vary, they might be in large measure swept from the
field of time, but those surviving showed a precision of in-
heritance from their parent forms, that was as profoundly sug-
gestive as it seemed profoundly puzzling. To him a tangled
puzzle of Nature was that which had to be unraveled. A
friend stood near Huxley, full thirty years ago, patiently en-
deavoring to untie the knot of a book package. In a moment
the great biologist’s knife was out, the string was cut, and
the remark was dropped “Life is too short for the unraveling
of knots.” But such was his own and Darwin’s life work.
So the latter essayed at least the explanation of heredity, and
tried to unravel the knot in his ingenious theory of pangenesis.
He clung to his views with typical tenacity against the doubts,
denials and even rejection of them by friends. It may be also
that we have not heard the last of it.

But no matter what the final and true explanation be, the
marvelous condensation and locking up of the minutest de-
tails shown by two individual organisms, in those smali cells
that we call the egg and sperm, their fusion and the subsequent
unfolding therefrom of a new individual, that blends in reduced
and often balanced degree the parental details, is evidence at
once of molecular organization and exactness that the mind
can scarcely grasp. Darwin groped after the explanation, it is
reserved for others to furnish it conclusively.

His life work thus consisted in demonstrating the order,
the continuity, and the increasing diversity of all organisms, as
these evolved with the increasing age of the world, and as
these showed increasingly complex responses and modifications
to their surroundings. Therefore reviewing all those laws and
discoveries that he, his predecessors, and his collaborators laid
bare, the history of organisms, as they file in procession before
us, might be epitomized as follows: Heredity upbuilds, strug-
gle for existence stimulates, environment carves and chisels,
reproduction blends and continues, selective survival sits as the
final arbiter of life or death for the individual and at length
for the species.

54
Such sentences may seem far distant from us, and to carry
a scientific or academic import only. But to every plant and
animal, to you and to me, they become immediate and claim-
ant problems of first import. It was this bringing near to our
doors, to our persons, of each phase of the whole, that caused
the mental upheaval in 1871 when the “Descent of Man” ap-
peared. Even the best of men at times kick when they dis-
cover that they live under eternal law. Their revolt was the
more evident when it was seen that some of the most cherished
human doctrines, were alike man-made and contrary to evolu-
tionary facts.

The Darwinian controversy then became no mere academic
problem, that each might intellectually take sides on. It was
not a question of Hegelian versus Descartian philosophy. It
was not merely a discussion of religious faith or belief, it did
not involve terms that could be explained away. Mankind be-
gan to realize, that it carried bound up in it the very warp
and woof of human life, of your life and mine.

Possibly it may be conceded that as Darwin enunciated it,
and as Huxley fought for it, the view seemed only and con-
stantly to be pressed home of “Nature red in tooth and
claw.” Darwin concluded his study of man at the stage where
this seemed truest. One longs to know, and may try to picture,
what might have resulted had he changed from a negative to a
positive attitude when he wrote “I have never systematically
thought much on religion in relation to science, or on morals
in relation to society; and without steadily keeping my mind
on such subjects for a Jong period, I am really incapable of
writing anything worth sending.”

We turn now from Darwin to the second group of col-
laborators, Spencer, Wallace and Haeckel. All three tried to
grapple with the moral, and one might truly say for each of
them, with the religious side of man.. For they viewed him as
the cope stone of organic evolution. Let me remind you here
of the discriminating, learned, and eminently fair criticisms

55
of the first and third of these, that you have already had from
my friend, Dr. Schiedt.

Spencer, like his writings, presents a calm calculating criti-
cal but cautious front. Wallace and especially Haeckel, the
two evolutionary giants still left to us in honored age, have
sounded the depths and shoals of human questions, the former
in a reverent, sympathetic, somewhat restricted spirit, the lat-
ter as a fearless, brilliant militant leader along any avenue of
thought or action that research seems to open, or that specu-
lation and imagination even suggest.

Spencer’s “Social Statics” took precedence of ‘The Ori-
gin of Species” by nine years, his ‘Principles of Psychology”
by four. In both, man is the pivotal organism round which
facts are arrayed. In both he studies man not merely as a
complex highly organized individual, he constantly emphasizes
the thought that each has a relation and duty to his fellow man.
And here moral relationship with mental superiority are both
dwelt on and expanded. Nay more, to give perfect continuity
and finish to his system, he traces the gradual evolution of life,
as well as of mental processes, from the minutest cell up to
man, and links with this the conception of an all pervading
power, energy, or action that later may have formed the basis
for Haeckel’s pantheistic utterances.

To the writer an impressive feature of Spencer’s ‘‘Psy-
chology” and still more of his “Sociology”, is his intense yearn-
ing after brotherhood, co-operation and peace, as correlated
with and flowing from an intelligent individualism. But the
sympathetic side of this desire never permitted him to lose
sight of the fact, that such results as had already been ac-
quired, were achieved by slow determined evolutionary means,
during which man had waded through blood and suffering
to achieve his high ends, as witness his letter to Wallace on
publication of “Progress and Poverty.” This notwithstanding,
Spencer’s ideal reduced to an aphorism is “Society an Organ-
ism.”

The last forty years of his life saw the sure because gradual

56
rise of co-operative societies, of trades unions, of business or-
ganizations, that all mark a mental and in most cases a moral
advance on the competitive and often brutal individualism of
the earlier years of the century. But he failed to see a direct
guiding principle that animated and propelled the movement,
while his outlook was often local and patriotic, rather than
world wide and comprehensive. So in “Facts and Comments,”
the closing book of his life, such chapters as “Rebarbariza-
tion,” “Regimentation” and “Barbaric Art” show, that while
a few years before he believed that he had built up a compre-
hensive evolutionary system, he failed to realize that human
imperfections existed in it, which other and later workers had
yet to correct. So his mental attitude is retrospective, gloomy
and despairing, while he failed to concede that an international
Temple of Peace was being planned, that international social-
ism was marching forward rapidly, that artistic products of
highest value were being manufactured wholesale by co-opera-
tive groups of workmen on every side of him, and that the for-
ward march of education was the most remarkable feature of
the decade in the middle of which “Facts and Comments” ap-
peared.

We must all grant that Spencer has bequeathed us a large
legacy. With no pretentions to the observational or experi-
mental breadth of Darwin; lacking in large measure therefore
the freshness and originality that come from direct contact
with Nature; largely ignorant of the continuous details of
botanical and zoological papers as clearly evidenced from his.
scant reference to current or preceding literature, and as can-
didly confessed by his secretary, Collier, he nevertheless
showed a wide analytic and synthetic grasp, that in its very
expansiveness carried him far beyond the regions that the
greater seer so fully and successfully explored. Some of his
most fundamental and cherished principles, the writer be-
lieves, will ultimately be set aside or reduced to minor place,
but equally the man and his work will live as strong links in the
great chain of evolutionary history.

of
Royce’s sympathetic estimate is worth quoting : “His beauti-
ful straightforwardness of personal character, his noble inde-
pendence of spirit, his loyalty to what he conceived to be his
task, his humanity, his advocacy of rational, social and inter-
national peace and liberty,—these things compensate for much
imperfection in the result of his philosophy. His demand
that the evolutionary concepts shall be unified, remains a per-
manently inspiring logical idea which will bear much fruit in
future. His service as a teacher of his age will never be for-
gotten.”

Wallace’s earlier studies were practically confined to zo-
ology, and much of that work had been more exhaustively
paralleled by Darwin, if we except his splendid investigations
into the geographical distribution of animals, on warning
colors in insects, and other valuable biological inquiries. But
the appearance of Darwin’s “Descent of Man’ caused Wal-
lace to indicate his dissent to the conclusions on man’s mental
and moral sides. Both naturalists had seen much of some of
earth’s lowest human tribes. Darwin, like Spencer and
Haeckel, regarded the evolutionary continuity as unbroken
and uniform. Wallace considered “‘that there is a difference
in kind, intellectually and morally, between man and other
animals; and that while his body was undoubtedly developed
by the continuous modification of some ancestral animal form,
some different agency, analogous to that which first produced
organic life, and then originated consciousness, came into
play in order to develop the higher intellectual and spiritual
nature of man.’ We would regard the hitherto adduced evi-
dence as largely in favor of the first three naturalists.

But Wallace has been a lofty and consistent advocate of
man’s freedom, his rights, and the necessity for his continued
mental and moral elevation. This, again, led him unreserved-
ly to accept Socialism on perusal of Bellamy’s and related
works. As already stated, he further accepted Spiritualism
as a definite phenomenon to be accounted for in man’s higher
being. The closing years of his life therefore see him aspiring,

58
even more earnestly than Spencer, toward “Society as an or-
ganism.” Why, it may here be asked, did both naturalists, and
to a modified degree, Haeckel, advocate such views? In an-
swer it might be replied, and perhaps correctly, that co-opera-
tive or socialistic effort has proved most beneficial in the evo-
lution of many of the highest groups of animals. The bees
ants and some wasps, among insects, groups of well known
and cosmopolitan birds, as well as many of the most widely
dispersed and abundant mammals show distinct social ten-
dencies. The resulting benefits for themselves and their young
offspring are many, and have unitedly enabled them to be-
come, in number of individuals, in wide distribution, and in
specialized efficiency ‘dominant races.” But we believe that
a far more important and a far-reaching law is involved, the
discussion of which has not yet been attempted. The attitude
of both naturalists, however, is a legacy worth treasuring,
view it as we may.

Haeckel, the outstanding champion of unification of the
world processes, is still happily left to us. No one can read his
“Monism” (1895), his “Riddle of the Universe” (1900), or
his “Wonders of Life” (1904), without feeling that here are
focused up messages to man from one who had, by his minute
study, wide reading, deep thinking, and love for his fellows,
qualified himself as few ever did for the task. If Darwin was
denounced by many in high places for trying to unfold the
truth, Haeckel has been thrice denounced. This has been
largely due to his impetuous scorn of all that would shackle
man’s intellect, that would destroy his freedom of body, that
would waste his time, or that would impose on his credulity
through a want of knowledge to combat error.

For him also man is the organism of supreme importance,
though he is but the highest expression of one great inde-
structible zorld-substance that is permeated by world-energy.
From this one ever-working, ever-changing combination,
monistic action flows. This expresses itself in physical, or-

59
ganic, mental and moral action under appropriate surroundings
and combinations. Reason and religion are its highest mani-
festations. “But it is only in the most highly developed ver-
tebrates—birds and mammals—that we discern the first be-
ginnings of reason, the first traces of religious and ethical con-

“\ duct.” In man this attains highest perfection, while the all

embracing pantheism of his faith finds expression in the words
“the monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our
present knowledge of Nature, recognizes the Divine Spirit in
all things. It can never recognize in God a ‘Personal Being’
or in other words, an individual of limited extension in space,
or even of human form. God is everywhere.”

For Haeckel it must be said, that even his worst and most
critical opponents present a less logical front and have stood
less the test of time than he. Du Bois-Reymond’s famous
seven world-enigmas, have—in three or four of them—been
in large part penetrated and satisfactorily solved. The revo-
lutionizing relations of radium as already studied, give a pos-
sible monistic explanation to chemico-physical action, while
his forerunners, Spinoza and Goethe, probably never had a
more numerous following than now. But to Haeckel, as to
all philosophers, the origin of the great First Cause, the ori-
gin of substance and of energy, are as insoluble now as when
man first began to reason on his relation to the universe.

Haeckel fails also largely in recognizing the noble char-
acter, powerful originality, and pure teachings of Christ as
well as some of his Disciples, and so has misinterpreted and
completely under-estimated the fundamental importance of
the Christ movement. This has largely been due, as we be-
lieve, to his having failed to separate the dross of subsequent
base concretions, from the gold that has helped the world on
to this day. Haeckel repeatedly acknowledges with gratitude
“the lofty principle of universal charity, and the fundamental
maxim of ethics, the ‘golden rule’ that issues therefrom.” But
he as often tries to evade its importance by saying “both, how-
ever, existed in theory and in practice, centuries before the

60
time of Christ.” But will we today belittle Darwin’s labors
because Buffon, Lamarck, Wells, Matthew and Spencer all
more or less antedated him?

The very fact that the altruistic doctrines of Christ and of
Paul overran the Old World against fearful odds and pre-
vailed, at one time in Waldensian valleys, at another in
Moravian homes; here on English plains against the persecu-
tions of a Charles, there across Scottish moorlands amid the
murderous assaults of a Claverhouse; at length in the Nether-
lands and from there to American shores, finding that triumph
that has come as a previous legacy to us, is proof of the potent
and pervasive character of the leaven. Equally true is it, that
during Frederick the Great’s “insane period of history,” from
the 5th to the 16th century, the highest representatives of spuri-
ous Christianity, from Pope down to priest, cursed the Christian
world, but that the primitive doctrine still flowed pure in many
streams to energize Humanity, and that the highest develop-
ment of the race has been reached as a post-Reformation ef-
fect. These are partial evidences in favor of the positions so
ably advocated by Drummond, Kidd and Chamberlain.

Disguise it as we may or as we wish to, the great central
Gospel law, the “Golden Rule,” is the perfected monistic
morality and religion of two millenia ago, that has helped and
inspired mankind up to the present day. This law interpreted
in Haeckel’s phraseology would be ‘Love the great World-
power that energizes and lives in matter, and that governs all
processes ; love also the units detached from it, and that will
be received back into it, as you would love yourself, since all
are equally derived.” Such is the fundamental concept that
Christ as well as Paul and other of the early seers taught, as
being alone able to develop “Society as an organism.” Such
the branches of the Christian Church teach when they please,
but they too often fail in large measure to commend it, or to
mould it to daily life.

Haeckel’s legacy to us will, we believe, be an increasing one
for the future, as representing final freedom for the intellect,

61
highest aspiration after noble ideals, and a reverential outlook
on all world forces. But whatever is best in that legacy will
be retained, by quiet and patient cross questioning of natural
phenomena, rather than by dogmatic insistence that “all is
finished,” “all is proved.” Final results have not yet been
reached, wide fields of study have yet to be explored.

The third group of workers, personified amongst others by
Drummond, Kidd and Chamberlain, may well be called the
post-Darwinian idealists, since their labors began when the
most active period for the others closed. Their studies also
have largely been concerned with the higher evolution of the
mental, moral and the religious sides of man. The writer be-
lieves he is neither unjust nor inaccurate in saying, that most
scientists have regarded them as unworthy of consideration,
because the scientists have not had the true measuring rod by
which to estimate them, while the high priests of religion have
placed them in the outer court of the Gentiles, for reasons that
are manifest. But their day is in the future, and when the im-
partial survery of 19th century thought is made, their con-
tributions will occupy no mean niche in the temple of evolu-
tionary truth. The writer considers that they largely stand
alone, because in the interpretation of natural and religious
processes the true continuity-relation has been overlooked.
But it would be impossible here and now to demonstrate the
correctness of this statement.

If we attempt then, in a few words, to estimate the meth-
ods, by which the evolutionary legacy of today has been se-
cured, it might be said that Darwin and Wallace thought wise-
ly, Spencer thought widely, Haeckel thought daringly, the last
group reverently. All have united in a successful effort, to
free the mind of man from misconceptions, to guide him into
true lines of reasoning, to use the knowledge of all ages that
has proved of permanent value, to perfect new methods of in-
vestigation and experiment, to scatter widespread the ac-
quired knowledge, as being for all future times and peoples.

It is recognized that the one organism Man possesses, domi-

62
nates, and will still more fully dominate the earth, so that Man’s
evolution is now the great and central problem of the system
that Darwin, Spencer, Wallace and Haeckel have established.
His world-wide advance and occupancy may seem to be check-
ed at one time by selective survival of the Russian thistle, at
another by the insidious relation and action of the mosquito,
in one place by the temporary fertility of the rabbit, in another
by “plague” of divers sorts. But the 19th century, the evolu-
tionary century, has included the year of his ‘‘coming of age.”
Man now no longer sees with the eyes of the individual; he
penetrates the past, the present, the future with the compound
eyes of “Society as an Organism.” Nationality counts now for
little, and will count for less in the future. World problems
are before us, for man’s exploitation of the world is becoming
increasingly easy.

Whether, therefore, it be an international study of infection
by mosquito or by tuberculosis germ; of selective breeding
along exact lines, for production of the best races of plants or
animals; of the acclimatization and adaptation of useful forms ;
of the reclamation and the enrichment of the earth; of the
best devices for man’s mental and ethical improvement; the
bonds of municipality, of state, of nationality can no longer
fetter or limit.

Such questions do not concern only sociologists, economists
or moralists. They are Biological Questions. And every hu-
man being is a biologist. For though each may not be trained
in this or that laboratory so called, each daily. experiences and
is affected by environmental agents, to which response is made.
Each records also, if in the least degree thinking and reflect-
ing, the cyclic changes noted in plants and animals around.
Results therefore accumulate that each describes to the home
circle, to friends, to the world, as impressively and effectively
mayhap, as does a teacher in some great University. This it
is which explains in large measure the remarkable success
which the works of Darwin, Spencer, Wallace, Huxley,
Haeckel, Drummond and Kidd have achieved. This is the

63
thinking, reflecting, acting age of mankind, and so when it
was groping after such works, because it needed them, they
were found and welcomed. The truths these works contain
will gradually be gathered and conserved, as jewels of the 19th
century. The slips, the mistakes, the rash statements, the false
generalizations will be eliminated, but meanwhile mankind
will march forward, as new seers arise to guide by added
truths.

May we not regard it then as the crowning legacy of roth
century advance, that knowledge is now for all, that schools,
colleges and universities no longer exist to manufacture a
select and privileged cult, but to people the world with the
highest types of earnest thinking individuals, that as today is
the best day in the world’s history, so future days will be
on ever higher planes?

No more beautiful, pathetic, longing reflection was ever
penned, than Herbert Spencer’s last chapter of “Facts and Com-
ments,” that he called ‘Ultimate questions.” It has in it the color
of the autumn leaf, the twittering wail of the English robin
which tells that Winter is coming, the first snowfall of the
Swiss mountain tops that brings early death to the alpine
flowers and butterflies. Spencer thought of each life—of his
own life—in its apparent insignificance, as compared with
space, illimitable space, with all its mysteries, and he felt over-
powered by his own littleness.

Though we may linger affectionately on the reflection, we
would not forget that every individual fills a place in that
space, and by all evolutionary laws must fill it to the fullest
and best degree. That is the call made on each of us. Each
one fills it best, who most highly and most perfectly responds.
harles Darwin.Three appreciations.By J.