this idea, or that their fathers considered it a scientific heresy to be condemned rather than seriously discussed."

For those who are not naturalists or men of science it is an object-lesson of the highest importance, that the speculations and observations which have led to the general acceptance of a new view as to the origin of the species of birds, butterflies, and flowers-in itself apparently a matter of no consequence to human life and progress should have necessarily led to a new epoch in philosophy, and in the higher state-craft; in fact, to the establishment of the scientific knowledge of life as the one sure guide and determining factor of civilisation. How to breed a healthy, capable race of men, how to preserve such a race, how to educate and to train it, so that its best qualities of mind and body may be brought to activity and perfection-this is what Darwinism can teach us, and will teach us when the great subjects of inheritance and of variation are more fully investigated by the aid of public funds, and when the human mind has been as carefully examined and its laws as well ascertained, as are those of the human body. There is no reason for delay; no excuse for it. For two thousand years the learned men of Europe debated as to whether this or that place was the site of ancient Troy, or whether there ever was such a place at all. At last (only twentyfive years ago) a retired man of business, named Schliemann, had a "happy thought "-it was not the thought of a learned pedant, but of a scientific investigator. He said, "Let us go and see." And at the expense of a few thousand pounds he went and found Troy and Mycenæ, and revealed-" dis-covered"-the whole matter. That was the most tremendous and picturesque triumph of the scientific method over mere talk and pretended historical learning which has ever been seen since human record has existed. It ought to be told to every boy and girl,

It

for it is the greatest and most obvious proof of the overwhelming power of the investigation of tangible things and the futility of chatter, which has ever been seen. is enough to inspire hope and belief in experiment even in the breast of a Member of Parliament, or of a Minister of the Crown.

A

IV

DARWIN'S DISCOVERIES

LARGE proportion of the public are not aware of the amount of experiment and observation carried out by the great naturalist whose memory was honoured by a splendid ceremony at the University of Cambridge in the summer of 1909. There are, I am sure, not a few who are under the impression that Darwin, sitting in his study or walking round his garden, had "a happy thought," namely, that man is only a modified and improved monkey, and proceeded to write an argumentative essay, setting forth the conclusion that mankind are the descendants of some remote ancestral apes. Of course there is an increasing number of more careful and inquiring men and women who take advantage of the small price at which Mr. Darwin's wonderful book, The Origin of Species, is now to be bought, and have read that and some of his other writings, and accordingly know how far he was from being the hasty and fanciful theorist they previously imagined him to be. It is the great distinction of Darwin that he spent more than twenty years of his life in accumulating the records of an enormous series of facts and observations tending to show that the species or "kinds" of animals and plants in nature can and do change slowly, and that there is, owing to the fact that every pair produces a great number of offspring (sometimes many thousand), of which only

a single pair, on the average, survive, a necessary selection of those which are to survive and breed, accompanied by a rejection and destruction of the rest. This "natural selection" or survival of favoured varieties, he was able to show, must operate like the selection made by breeders, fanciers, and horticulturists, and has in all probability (for in a history extending over hundreds of thousands of years we must necessarily deal with "probabilities," and not with direct demonstration) produced new forms, new kinds, better adapted to their surroundings than the parental forms from which they are derived.

It was necessary, in order that Darwin should persuade other naturalists that his views were correct, that he should show by putting examples "on the table" that variations occur naturally and in great diversity; further, that there is great pressure in the conditions of life, and a consequent survival of the best-suited varieties; further, that there is in reproduction a transmission of the peculiar favouring character or quality which enables a variety to survive, and thus a tendency to perpetuate the new quality. It was not enough for Darwin to "imagine" that these things might be so, or to make the notion that they are so plausible by arguments drawn from existing knowledge. He had to do that: but also he had to make new inquiries and discover new things about animals and plants which fitted in with his theory and would not fit in either with the notion that all plants and animals were created-as the poet Milton supposed -out of lumps of earth and muddy water, suddenly, in the likeness of their present-day descendants, nor with some other notions, such as that of the able and gifted French naturalist Lamarck. And he spent the later twenty years of his life in doing so, just as he had spent the previous twenty years in collecting a first series

of facts and observations justifying his theory before he announced it to the world.

A great difference between Lamarck and Darwin exists, not only in their two theories as to the mode of origin of the vast diversified series of kinds or species of plants and animals, but in their way of stating and dealing with the theory which each thought out and gave to the world. Lamarck had a great knowledge of the species of plants and animals, partly through having collected specimens himself when he was an officer in the French Republican army which was employed on the Mediterranean shores of France and Italy more than a hundred years ago, and partly through his later official position in the great natural history museum at Paris, where large collections passed through his hands. He was a man of very keen insight and excellent method, and did more to plan out a natural and satisfactory "classification" of animals than any one between his own day and that of Linnæus. His theory of the origin of species was essentially an opposition to the then popular view that the species of living things have been made by the Creator so as to fit the conditions in which they live. Lamarck contradicted this view, and said in so many words that the real fact is that the peculiar specific characters of animals or of plants have not been created for their conditions, but, on the contrary, that the conditions in which they live have created the peculiarities of living things. In so far his conception was the same as Darwin's. But Lamarck then said to himself: How do the conditions create the peculiarities of different living things? And he answered this question by an ingenious guess, which he published to the world in a book called Philosophical Zoology, without taking any steps to test the truth of his guess.

That is where Lamarck's method and attitude as a