by Grant Allen
The British Association for the Advancement of Science held its big annual doctrinaire picnic the next summer after the publication of Darwin’s book, at Oxford. The Oxford meeting was a stormy and a well-remembered one. The ‘Origin of Species’ was there discussed and attacked before a biological section strangely enough presided over by Darwin’s old Cambridge teacher, Professor Henslow. Though then a beneficed parish priest, Henslow had the boldness frankly to avow his own acceptance of his great pupil’s startling conclusions. Huxley followed in the same path, as did also Lubbock and Hooker. On the whole, the evolutionists were already in the ascendant; the fresh young intellects especially being quick to seize upon the new pabulum so generously dealt out to them by the new evolutionism.
Among scientific minds of the first order, Lyell alone in England, heavily weighted by theological preconceptions, for awhile hung back. All his life long, as his letters show us, the great geologist had felt the powerful spell of the Lamarckian hypothesis continually enticing him with its seductive charm. He had fought against it blindly, in the passionate endeavour to preserve what he thought his higher faith in the separate and divine creation of man; but ever and anon he returned anew to the biological Circe with a fresh fascination, as the moth returns to the beautiful flame that has scorched and singed it. In a well-known passage in the earlier editions of his ‘Principles of Geology,’ the father of uniformitarianism gives at length his own reasons for dissenting from the doctrine of evolution as then set forth; and even after Darwin’s discovery had supplied him with a new clue, a vera causa, a sufficient power for the modification of species into fresh forms, theological difficulties made him cling still as long as possible to the old theory of the origin of man which he loved to describe as that of the ‘archangel ruined.’ He was loth to exchange this cherished belief for the degrading alternative (as it approved itself to him) of the ape elevated. But in the end, with the fearless honesty of a searcher after truth, he gave way slowly and regretfully. Always looking back with something like remorse to the flesh-pots of the ecclesiastical Egypt, with its enticing visions of fallen grandeur, the great thinker whose uniformitarian theory of geology had more than aught else paved the way for the gradual acceptance of Darwin’s evolutionism, came out at last from the house of bondage, and nobly ranged himself on the side of what his intellect judged to be the truth of nature, though his emotions urged him hard to blind his judgment and to neglect its lights for an emotional figment. Science has no more pathetic figure than that of the old philosopher, in his sixty-sixth year, throwing himself with all the eagerness of youth into what he had long considered the wrong scale, and vigorously wrecking in the ‘Antiquity of Man’ what seemed to the dimmed vision of his own emotional nature the very foundations of his beloved creed. But still he did it. He came out and was separate. In his own idiomatic language, he found at last that ‘we must go the whole ourang;’ and, deep as was the pang that the recantation cost him, he formally retracted the condemnation of ‘transformism’ in his earlier works, and accepted, however unwillingly, the theory he had so often and so deliberately rejected.
The ‘Antiquity of Man’ came out in February 1863, some three years after the ‘Origin of Species.’ For some time speculation had been active over the strange hatchets which Boucher de Perthes had recently unearthed among the Abbeville drift — shapeless masses of chipped flint rudely fashioned into the form of an axe, which we now call palæolithic implements, and know to be the handicraft of preglacial men. But until Lyell’s authoritative work appeared the unscientific public could not tell exactly what to think of these curious and almost unhuman-looking objects. Lyell at once set all doubts at rest; the magic of his name silenced the derisive whispers of the dissidents. Already, in the previous year, the first fasciculus of Colenso’s famous work on the Pentateuch had dealt a serious blow from the ecclesiastical and critical side at the authenticity and historical truth of the Mosaic cosmogony. Lyell now from the scientific side completely demolished its literal truth, as ordinarily interpreted, by throwing back the primitive origin of our race into a dim past of immeasurable antiquity. In so doing he was clearing the way for Charles Darwin’s second great work, ‘The Descent of Man;’ and by incorporating in his book Huxley’s remarks on the Neanderthal skull, and much similar evolutionary matter, he advertised the new creed in the animal origin of our race with all the acquired weight of his immense and justly-deserved European reputation. As a matter of taste, Lyell did not relish the application of evolutionism to his own species. But, with that perfect loyalty to fact which he shared so completely with Charles Darwin, as soon as he found the evidence overwhelming, he gave in. By that grudging concession he immensely strengthened the position of the new creed. ‘I plead guilty,’ he writes to Sir Joseph Hooker, ‘to going farther in my reasoning towards transmutation than in my sentiments and imagination, and perhaps for that very reason I shall lead more people on to Darwin and you, than one who, being born later, like Lubbock, has comparatively little to abandon of old and long-cherished ideas, which constituted the charm to me of the theoretical part of the science in my earlier days.’ And to Darwin himself he writes regretfully. ‘The descent of man from the brutes takes away much of the charm from my speculations on the past relating to such matters.’ This very reluctance itself told powerfully in favour of Charles Darwin’s novel theories: there is no evidence more valuable to a cause than that which it extorts by moral force, in spite of himself, from the faltering lips of an unwilling witness.
The same year that saw the publication of Lyell’s ‘Antiquity of Man’ saw also the first appearance of Huxley’s work on ‘Man’s Place in Nature.’ Darwin himself had been anxious rather than otherwise to avoid too close reference to the implications of his theory as regards the origin and destiny of the human race. He had desired that his strictly scientific views on the rise of specific distinctions should be judged entirely on their own merits, unhampered by the interference of real or supposed theological and ethical considerations. His own language on all such subjects, wherever he was compelled to trench on them in the ‘Origin of Species,’ was guarded and conciliatory; he scarcely referred at all to man or his history; and his occasional notices of the moving principle and first cause of the entire cosmos were reverential and religious in the truest sense and in the highest degree. But you cannot let loose a moral whirlwind, and then attempt to direct its course; you cannot open the floodgates of opinion or of speculation, and then pretend to set limits to the scope of their restless motion. Darwin soon found out that people would insist in drawing inferences beyond what was written, and in seeing implicit conclusions when they were not definitely formulated in the words of their author. ‘Man is perennially interesting to man,’ says the great chaotic American thinker; and whatever all-embracing truth you set before him, you may be sure that man will see in it chiefly the implications that most closely affect his own happiness and his own destiny. The biological question of the origin of species is a sufficiently wide one, but it includes also, among other cases, the origin of the very familiar species Homo sapiens of Linnæus. Some theologians jumped at once at the conclusion, right or wrong, that if Darwinism were true man was nothing more than a developed monkey, the immortal soul was an exploded myth, the foundations of religion itself were shattered, and the wave of infidelity was doomed to swamp the whole of Christendom with its blank nihilism. Scientific men, on the other hand, drew the conclusion that man must be descended, like other mammals, from some common early vertebrate ancestor, and that the current views of his origin and destiny must be largely modified by the evolutionary creed. Of this profound scientific belief Professor Huxley’s maiden work was the earliest outcome.
Meantime, on the continent of Europe and over-sea in America, the Darwinian theory was being hotly debated and warmly defended. France, coldly sceptical and critical, positive rather than imaginative in matters of science, and little prone by native cast of mind to the evolutionary attitude, stood aloof to
a great extent from the onward course of the general movement. Here and there, to be sure, a Gaudry or a Ribot, a Delboeuf or a De Candolle (the two latter a Liège Belgian and a Genevan Swiss) might heartily throw himself into the new ideas, and contribute whole squadrons of geological or botanical fact to the final victory. Yet, as a whole, the dry and cautious French intelligence, ever inclined to a scientific opportunism, preferred for the moment to stand by expectant and await the result of the European consensus. But philosophical Germany, on the other hand, beaming enthusiasm from its myriad spectacles, eagerly welcomed the novel ideas, and proclaimed from the housetops the evolutionary faith as a main plank in the rising platform of the newly-roused Kulturkampf. Fritz Müller began with all the ardour of a fresh convert to collect his admirable ‘Facts for Darwin;’ his brother Hermann sat down with indomitable patience, like the master’s own, to watch the ceaseless action of the bees and butterflies in the fertilisation of flowers. Rütimeyer applied the Darwinian principles to the explanation of mammalian relationships, and Haeckel set to work upon his vast reconstructive ‘History of Creation,’ a largely speculative work which, with all its faults, distinctly carried forward the evolutionary impulse, and set fresh researchers working upon new lines, to confirm or to disprove its audacious imaginings. In America, Asa Gray gave to the young creed the high authority of his well-known name, and Chauncey Wright helped it onward on the road with all the restrained force of his singular and oblique but powerful and original personality. If Agassiz and Dawson still hesitated, Fiske and Youmans were ardent in the faith. If critical Boston put up its eye-glass doubtfully, Chicago and St. Louis were ready for conversion. Everywhere Darwin and Darwinism became as household words; it was the singular fate of the great prophet of evolution, alone almost among the sons of men, to hear his own name familiarly twisted during his own lifetime into a colloquial adjective, and to see the Darwinian theory and the errors of Darwinism staring him in the face a hundred times a day from every newspaper and every periodical.
Of course the ‘Origin of Species’ was largely translated at once into all the civilised languages of Europe, Russian as well as French, Dutch as well as German, Swedish as well as Italian, Spanish as well as Hungarian, nay even, at last, transcending narrow continental limits, Japanese as well as Hindustani. The revolution which it was rapidly effecting was indeed a revolution in every mode of thought and feeling as well as a revolution in mere restricted biological opinion. But all this time, the modest, single-minded, and unassuming author was working unmoved among his plants and pigeons in his home at Down, regardless of the European fame he was so quickly acquiring, and anxious only to bring to a termination the vast work which he still contemplated. A little more than eleven years intervened between the publication of the ‘Origin of Species,’ in 1859, and the first appearance of the ‘Descent of Man,’ in 1871. The interval was occupied in carrying out in part the gigantic scheme of his original collections for the full treatment of the development theory. The work published in 1859 Darwin regarded merely as an abstract and preliminary outline of his full opinions: ‘No one can feel more sensible than I do,’ he wrote, ‘of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded.’ The marvellously learned work on the ‘Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,’ which came out in two volumes in 1867, formed the first instalment of this long-projected treatise. The second part, as he told Mr. Fiske, was to have treated of the variation of animals and plants through natural selection; while the third part would have dealt at length with the phenomena of morphology, of classification, and of distribution in space and time. But these latter portions of the work were never written. To say the truth, they were never needed. So universal was the recognition among the younger men of Darwin’s discovery, that before ten years were over innumerable workers were pushing out the consequences of natural selection into every field of biology and palæontology. It seemed no longer so necessary as it had once seemed to write the larger and more elaborate treatise he had originally contemplated.
The volume on the variation of animals and plants contained also Darwin’s one solitary contribution to the pure speculative philosophy of life — his ‘Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis,’ by which he strove to account on philosophical principles for the general facts of physical and mental heredity. Not to mince matters, it was his one conspicuous failure, and is now pretty universally admitted as such. Let not the love of the biographer deceive us; Darwin was here attempting a task ultra vires. As already observed, his mind, vast as it was, leaned rather to the concrete than to the abstract side: he lacked the distinctively metaphysical and speculative twist. Strange to say, too, his abortive theory appeared some years later than Herbert Spencer’s magnificent all-sided conception of ‘Physiological Units,’ put forth expressly to meet the self-same difficulty. But while Darwin’s hypothesis is rudely materialistic, Herbert Spencer’s is built up by an acute and subtle analytical perception of all the analogous facts in universal nature. It is a singular instance of a crude and essentially unphilosophic conception endeavouring to replace a finished and delicate philosophical idea.
Earlier still, in 1862, Darwin had published his wonderful and fascinating book on the ‘Fertilisation of Orchids.’ It is delightful to contemplate the picture of the unruffled naturalist, in the midst of that universal storm of ecclesiastical obloquy and scientific enthusiasm which he had roused throughout Europe, sitting down calmly in his Kentish conservatory to watch the behaviour of catasetums and masdevallias, and to work out the details of his chosen subject, with that marvellous patience of which he was so great a master, in the pettiest minutiæ of fertilisation as displayed by a single highly developed family of plants. Whoever wishes to learn the full profundity of Darwin’s researches, into every point that he set himself to investigate, cannot do better than turn for a while to the consideration of that exquisite treatise on one of the quaintest fairylands of science. He will there learn by what an extraordinary wealth of cunning devices natural selection has ensured the due conveyance of the fecundating pollen from stamens to stigmas within the limits of a single group of vegetable organisms. Here the fertilising mass is gummed automatically between the eyes of the exploring bee, and then bent round by the drying of its stalk so as to come in contact with the stigmatic surface. There the pollen club is jerked out elastically by a sensitive fibre, and actually flung by its irritable antennæ at the unconscious head of the fertilising insect. In one case, the lip of the flower secretes moisture and forms a sort of cold bath, which wets the wings of the bees, so compelling them to creep out of the bucket by a passage close to the anthers and stigma; in another case, the honey is concealed at the bottom of so long a tube that only the proper fertilising moth with a proboscis of ten or eleven inches in length can probe the deep recess in which it is hidden. These, and a hundred other similar instances, were all carefully considered and described by the great naturalist as the by-work with which he filled up one of the intervals between his greater and more comprehensive treatises.
In the decade between 1860 and 1870 the progress of Darwinism was rapid and continuous. One by one, the few scientific men who still held out were overborne by the weight of evidence. Geology kept supplying fresh instances of transitional forms; the progress of research in unexplored countries kept adding to our knowledge of existing intermediate species and varieties. During those ten years, Herbert Spencer published his ‘First Principles,’ his ‘Biology,’ and the remodelled form of his ‘Psychology;’ Huxley brought out ‘Man’s Place in Nature,’ the ‘Lectures on Comparative Anatomy,’ and the ‘Introduction to the Classification of Animals;’ Wallace produced his ‘Malay Archipelago’ and his ‘Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection;’ and Galton wrote his admirable work on ‘Hereditary Genius,’ of which his own family is so remarkable an instance. Tyndall and Lewes had long since signified their warm adhesion. At Oxford, Rolleston was bringing up a
fresh generation of young biologists in the new faith; at Cambridge, Darwin’s old university, a whole school of brilliant and accurate physiologists was beginning to make itself both felt and heard in the world of science. In the domain of anthropology, Tylor was welcoming the assistance of the new ideas, while Lubbock was engaged on his kindred investigations into the Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man. All these diverse lines of thought both showed the wide-spread influence of Darwin’s first great work, and led up to the preparation of his second, in which he dealt with the history and development of the human race. And what was thus true of England was equally true of the civilised world, regarded as a whole: everywhere the great evolutionary movement was well in progress; everywhere the impulse sent forth from that quiet Kentish home was permeating and quickening the entire pulse of intelligent humanity.
Why was it that the ‘Origin of Species’ possessed this extraordinary vitalising and kinetic power, this germinal energy, this contagious force, beyond all other forms of evolutionism previously promulgated? Why did the world, that listened so coldly to Lamarck and Chambers, turn so ready an ear to Charles Darwin and natural selection? Partly, no doubt, because in the fulness of time the moment had come and the prophet had arisen. All great movements are long brewing, and burst out at last (like the Reformation and the French Revolution) with explosive energy. But the cause is largely to be found, also, I believe, in the peculiar nature of the Darwinian solution. True, a thoroughly logical mind, a mind of the very highest order, would have said even before Darwin, ‘Creation can have no possible place in the physical series of things at all. How organisms came to be I do not yet exactly see; but I am sure they must have come to be by some merely physical process, if we could only find it out.’ And such minds were all actually evolutionary even before Darwin had made the modus operandi of evolution intelligible. But most people are not so clear-sighted. They require to have everything proved to them by the strictest collocation of actual instances. They will not believe unless one rise from the dead. There are men who rejected the raw doctrine of special creation on evidence adduced; and there are men who never even for a moment entertained it as conceivable. The former compose the mass of the scientific world, and it was for their conversion that the Darwinian hypothesis was so highly salutary. As Professor Fiske rightly remarks, ‘The truth is that before the publication of the “Origin of Species” there was no opinion whatever current respecting the subject that deserved to be called a scientific hypothesis. That the more complex forms of life must have come into existence through some process of development from simpler forms was no doubt the only sensible and rational view to take of the subject; but in a vague and general opinion of this sort there is nothing that is properly scientific. A scientific hypothesis must connect the phenomena with which it deals by alleging a “true cause;” and before 1859 no one had suggested a “true cause” for the origination of new species, although the problem was one over which every philosophical naturalist had puzzled since the beginning of the century. This explains why Mr. Darwin’s success was so rapid and complete, and it also explains why he came so near being anticipated.’ To put it briefly, a priori, creation is from the very first unbelievable; but, as a matter of evidence, Lamarck failed to make evolution comprehensible, or to give a rationale of its mode of action, while Darwin’s theory of natural selection succeeded in doing so for those who awaited a posteriori proof. Hence Darwin was able to convert the world, where Lamarck had only been able to stir up enquiry among the picked spirits of the scientific and philosophical coterie. Therein lies the true secret of his rapid, his brilliant, and his triumphant progress. He had found out not only that it was so, but how it was so, too. In Aristotelian phrase, he had discovered the πῶς as well as the ὅτι.
