six years, there was none which exercised so deep an influence аs the "Origin of Species," by Charles Darwin.
Already Buffon in the eighteenth century, and Lamarck in the very first years of the nineteenth, had ventured to maintain that the different species of plants and animals peopling the Earth do not represent immutable forms. They are variable, and vary continually under the influence of their surroundings. The family likeness which we recognise in different species belonging to a particular group is a proof, they said, that these species descended from a common ancestor. Thus, the different kinds of buttercup which we find in our prairies and in our marshes must be the descendants of one and the same ancestral kind—descendants that have grown dissimilar in consequence of a series of changes and adaptations they have been subjected to in the varied circumstances of their existence. Likewise, the present species of wolf, dog, jackal, fox, did not formerly exist; but in their stead there was once a species of animals which in the course of ages gave birth to the several branches representing now the wolves, the dogs, the jackals, and the foxes.
But in the eighteenth century it was dangerous to profess such "heresies." For far less than that the Church had already threatened to prosecute Buffon, and he had been compelled to recant his statements about the geological evolution of the Earth. The Church at that time was still very powerful, and the naturalist who dared to uphold heresies offensive to her was threatened with prison, torture, or the madhouse. That is why the "heretics" spoke with so much prudence all through the first half of the nineteenth century. But now, in the second half of the century, after the revolutions of 1848, Darwin and Wallace could bravely affirm the same heretic teaching, and Darwin had also the courage to add that man, too, was the product of a slow physiological evolution; that he drew his origin from a species of animals which gave birth both to man and the now-living apes and monkeys; that the "immortal mind" and the "moral sense" of man had developed in the same way as the intelligence and the social instincts of a chimpanzee or an ant.
We know what thunderbolts were hurled by the Elders of the Churches at Darwin, and especially at his courageous, learned and intelligent apostle, Huxley, who made most of those Darwinian conclusions which chiefly alarmed the priests of all religions.
The struggle was hot, but the Darwinians emerged victorious, and since then a new science—biology, the science of life in all its manifestations—has grown up under our very eyes. The
