what he knew to be the truth. He took the ancient, indefinite idea of evolution and welded it into an organized theory, and armed it with an array of facts that made it irresistible. While some of Darwin's beliefs have failed to show the importance he assigned them, and others of them are very probably errors, there are few indeed who seriously, from the standpoint of science, care to question the conception that all living things have developed from earlier living things of simpler or more primitive character. His careful, painstaking work gained for his ideas a world wide acceptance among thinking men, and made Charles Darwin one of the greatest figures in the history of science.
The story of Darwin's life is a story of long, careful study and preparation, of rapid publication of his discoveries when he set out to write them, and finally of triumph over those who opposed him. He was born on the twelfth of February, 1809, the same day that brought the world Abraham Lincoln. Someone has said that on that day the world's greatest liberators were born—in America the one who would free the bodies of men from bondage; in England the man who would free their minds from a no less real slavery to custom, power, and worn-out dogma.
When he was sixteen years old, Darwin went to Edinburgh to study medicine. But he was already a rebel against dryness and dead academic thought, and wrote home that the lectures in anatomy were quite as dry as was the
