And now let us ask ourselves, in all sincerity, what was the final outcome and net result of Darwin\'s great and useful life?

If Charles Darwin had never existed at all, there would still have been a considerable and expansive evolutionary movement both in biology and in its sister sciences throughout the latter half of the present century. The harvest indeed was ready, and the labourers, though few, were full of vigour. Suppose for a moment that that earnest and single-hearted Darwinian genius had been cut off by some untimely disease of childhood at five years old, all other conditions remaining as they were, we should even so have had in our midst to-day, a small philosophical and influential band of evolutionary workers. Spencer would none the less have given us his \'First Principles\' and the major part of his \'Principles of Biology,\' with comparatively little alteration or omission. Wallace would none the less have promulgated his inchoate theory of natural selection, and rallied round his primordial conception the very best and deepest minds of the biological fraction. Geology would have enforced the continuity[Pg 193] of types; Cope and Marsh would have unearthed for our edification the ancestral forms of the evolving horse and the toothed birds of the Western American deposits. The Solenhofen lithographic slates would still have yielded us the half-reptilian, half-avian Arch?opteryx; the tertiary deposits would still have presented us with a long suite of gradually specialised and modified mammalian forms. The Siberian meadows would have sent us that intermediate creature which Prjevalsky recognises as the half-way house between the horses and the donkeys; the rivers of Queensland would have disclosed to our view that strange lung-bearing and gill-breathing barramunda, in which Günther discerns the missing link between the ganoid fishes on the one hand, and the mudfish and salamandroid amphibians on the other. From data such as these, biologists and pal?ontologists of the calibre of Huxley, Gaudry, Geikie, Rütimeyer, and Busk, would necessarily have derived, by the aid of Wallace\'s pregnant principle, conclusions not so very far remote from Darwin\'s own. Heer and Saporta would have drawn somewhat similar inferences from the fossil flora of Switzerland and of Greenland; Hooker and De Candolle would have read pretty much the self-same lessons in the scattered ferns and scanty palm-trees of oceanic islands. Kowalevsky would have seen in the ascidian larva a common prototype of the vertebrate series; the followers of Von Baer would have popularised the embryological conception of the single origin of animal life. The researches of Boucher de Perthes, of Lyell, of Evans, of Boyd Dawkins, of Keller, and of Christy and Lartet, would have unrolled before our eyes, under any circumstances, the strange[Pg 194] story of prehistoric man. On the facts so gained, Lubbock and Tylor, Schaafhausen and Büchner, would have built up their various consistent theories of human development and human culture. In short, even without Charles Darwin, the nineteenth century would not have stood still; it would have followed in the wake of Buffon and Diderot, of Lamarck and Laplace, of St. Hilaire and Goethe, of Kant and Herschel, of Hutton and Lyell, of Malthus and of Spencer. The great world never rolls down the abysses of time obedient to the nod of one single overruling Titanic intellect. \'If the doctrine of evolution had not existed,\' says Huxley, \'pal?ontologists must have invented it.\'

But Charles Darwin acted, nevertheless, the part of an immense and powerful accelerating energy. The impetus which he gave gained us at least fifty years of progress; it sent us at a bound from Copernicus to Newton; so far as ordinary minds were concerned, indeed, it transcended at a single leap the whole interval from Ptolemy to Herschel. The comparison is far from being a mere rhetorical one. A close analogy really exists between the two cases. Before Copernicus, the earth stood fixed and immovable in the centre of the universe, with obsequious suns, and planets, and satellites dancing attendance in cycle and epicycle around the solid mass, to which by day and night they continually ministered. The great astronomical revolution begun by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, and completed by Newton, Laplace, and Herschel, reduced the earth to its true position as a petty planet, revolving feebly among its bigger brethren round a petty sun, in some lost corner of a vast, majestic, and almost illimitable galaxy. Even so, before Darwin,[Pg 195] man stood in his own esteem the fixed point of an anthropocentric universe, divinely born and divinely instructed, with all the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air, and the fruits of the earth specially created with a definite purpose in subservience to his lordly wants and interests. The great biological revolution, which rightly almost sums itself up in the name of Darwin, reduced man at once to his true position as the last product of kinetic solar energy, working upon the peculiar chemical elements of an evolving planet. It showed that every part of every plant and every animal existed primarily for the sake of that plant or animal alone; it unseated man from his imaginary throne in the centre of the cosmos, teaching him at once a lesson of humility and a lesson of aspiration—pointing out to him how low was the origin from which, in very truth, he first sprang, and suggesting to him, at the same time, how high was the grand and glorious destiny to which by his own strenuous and ardent efforts he might yet perchance some day attain.

That result, inevitable perhaps in the long run, from the slow unfolding of human intelligence, was immensely hastened in our own time by the peculiar idiosyncrasy and lofty personality of Charles Darwin. Without him we should have had, not only evolutionism, but also, as Wallace\'s discovery testifies, natural selection itself into the bargain. But we should never have had the \'Origin of Species.\' We should never have had that vast and enthusiastic consensus of scientific opinion through an all but unanimous thinking world, which has forced an immediate acceptance of evolutionary ideas down the unwilling throats of half unthinking Europe. The[Pg 196] prodigious mass of Darwin\'s facts, the cautious working of Darwin\'s intellect, the immense weight of Darwin\'s reputation, the crushing force of Darwin\'s masterly inductive method, bore down before them all opposition in the inner circle of biologists, and secured the triumph of the evolutionary system even in the very strongholds of ignorance and obscurantism. Without Darwin, a small group of philosophic thinkers would still be striving to impress upon an incredulous and somewhat contemptuous world the central truths of the evolutionary doctrine. The opposition of the elders, long headed even in the society we actually know by a few stern scientific recalcitrants, like Owen and Agassiz, Pictet and Dawson, Virchow and Mivart, would have fought desperately in the last trench for the final figment of the fixity of species. What is now the general creed, more or less loosely held and imperfectly understood, of hundreds and thousands among the intelligent mass, would, under such circumstances, be even yet the mere party-shibboleth of an esoteric few, struggling hard against the bare force of overwhelming numbers to ensure not only recognition but a fair hearing for the first principles of the development theory. It is to Darwin, and to Darwin almost alone, that we owe the present comparatively wide acceptance of the all-embracing doctrine of evolution.

No other man did so much or could have done so much to ensure its triumph. He began early in life to collect and arrange a vast encyclop?dia of facts, all finally focussed with supreme skill upon the great principle he so clearly perceived, and so lucidly expounded. He brought to bear upon the question an amount of[Pg 197] personal observation, of minute experiment, of world-wide book-knowledge, of universal scientific ability, such as never perhaps was lavished by any other man upon any other department of study. His conspicuous and beautiful love of ............