CHAPTER XIII.

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DARWIN AND MODERN SCIENCE.

Na Sunday afternoon in 1877, a party of visitors to the house of Sir John Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury), were taken by their host to visit his neighbour, Charles Darwin. Gladstone was one of them, and it is Lord Morley, in his biography of that statesman, who tells the story. Gladstone was then full of indignation about Turkish atrocities, upon which he had been writing a trouncing pamphlet. "Mr. Gladstone, as soon as seated," says the biographer, "took Darwin's interest in lessons of massacre for granted, and launched forth his thunderbolts with unexhausted zest. His great, wise, simple and truthloving listener, then, I think, busy on digestive powers of the drosera in his greenhouse, was intensely delighted. When we broke up, watching Mr. Gladstone's erect, alert figure as he walked away, Darwin, shading his eyes with his hand against the evening rays, said to me in unaffected satisfaction, 'What an honour that such a great man should come to visit me!'"

To one conversant with the scientific writings of Darwin, and with his profound and far-reaching influence upon the thought of the world, but unacquainted with his Life and Letters, that manifestation of modesty might seem startling. Truly, a visit from Gladstone was an honour which any man then living might have esteemed as such; but, then, there was no man living who should not have felt deeply honoured at being permitted to visit so great a genius as Darwin. Modesty, however, concerning his own personal merits and attainments was one of the outstanding attributes of his character. Extraordinarily patient in investigation, gifted with the rarest powers of imagination which enabled him to perceive the unifying principle in a multitude of facts, so penetrating in his vision that the most

minute phenomena and the largest sweep of geological time were focused together in his comprehensive mind, he was yet chiefly concerned that pure truth should be proclaimed, and regarded his own part in the revelation as being of minor importance.

The story is well known of Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, working independently and unaware of each other's line of enquiry, arriving concurrently at the generalisation that species have originated from the operation of the principle of natural selection. Darwin had been reflecting and observing for twenty years before his first essay on the subject was ready for publication. Wallace, with much less labour to support the proposition, had prepared an essay which was ready to be published before Darwin's. Both papers were, in fact, given to the world in the "Journal of the Linnean Society" in 1858. Wallace, who was in the Malay Archipelago when he wrote his essay-"On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type"-sent it to Darwin to read. Without a moment's hesitation Darwin offered to try to get it published. There was no question of pique, no suggestion of holding back Wallace's work on account of his own claim. Darwin had written out a sketch of the theory as far back as 1842, and his manuscript existed, in proof of his earlier work.1 Few men could have repressed a feeling of annoyance at being anticipated. But Darwin had none, because to him the promulgation of truth was more important than the establishment of his priority. He simply noted in the quietest style conceivable, that "my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed; though my book, if ever it will have any value, will not be deteriorated, as all the labour consists in the application of the theory."

Wallace, too, it should be added, was not less fine in his surrender of personal claim. "I have felt all my life, and I still feel," he said, in relating his part in these circumstances, "the most sincere satisfaction that Darwin had been at work long before me, and that it was not left for me to attempt to write the Origin of Species. I have long since measured my own strength, and know well that it would be quite unequal to that task." No person can read

1 The original essay was found among Darwin's papers after his death, and was published in 1909 by his son, Francis Darwin.

the narrative of this great-hearted courtesy, so free from any tinge of egotism, without feeling that these men, from the loftiness of their standpoint, were worthy to be the founders of a new order of scientific thinking.

There was no piece of Darwin's work which was not the result of the same kind of prolonged reflection and observation as delayed the publication of his Natural Selection hypothesis until he was sure of his ground. A single experiment, which he described in his work on The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, took twentynine years to mature. It was suggested to him after he had written a paper on the Formation of Mould, that probably the action of worms, in casting small particles of earth to the surface, had the effect of covering stones. In 1842, upon his own land at Down, Darwin strewed pieces of broken chalk over parts of a field, and carefully noted the date and purpose. In 1871, the pieces of chalk were found to have become buried seven inches below the surface, and it was further determined that acids generated in the bodies of worms have the effect of disintegrating stones and converting them into soil. The experiments which Darwin made with these lowly creatures of the underworld, which he collected and kept for study, were wonderfully minute, ingenious and full of fascination; and they proved so abundantly the work of worms in the making of soil, that a horticulturist who reads about them should be inclined thenceforth to take of his hat to a worm whenever he sees

one.

"The sublime patience of the investigator" was the quality out of which sprang those brilliant generalisations of Darwin that startled and illuminated the world. To think of his theory of Natural Selection, of his conclusion that man has been evolved from lower forms of animal life, of his deduction from the existence of coral islands that the ocean bed where they are found has subsided-to think of these and all the other hypotheses which he launched and supported by a wealth of evidence, as guesses, coming to him in flashes of insight, is to misinterpret his genius. His works are crowded with freshly gleaned facts affecting animals, plants and the earth, all of which represent unremitting though delightful labour. We may try an experi

ment with the Origin of Species, opening the volume at random. At page 539 this passage meets the eye

"I do not believe that botanists are aware how charged the mud of ponds is with seeds. I have tried several little experiments, but will here give only the most striking case. I took in February three tablespoonfuls of mud from three different points, beneath water, on the edge of a little pond; this mud when dried weighed only six and three-quarter ounces. I kept it covered up in my study for six months, pulling up and counting each plant as it grew. The plants were of many kinds, and were altogether 537 in number; and yet the viscid mud was all contained in a breakfast cup."

How interesting the fact-five hundred productive seeds in three spoonfuls of mud! And how carefully made is the observation; how patiently watched, counted and classified are the plants! On the opposite page of the book as it lies. open is another instance. Darwin is discussing the diffusion of seeds and shells by means of the feet of birds; so he tries this experiment:

"I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium, where many ova of fresh water shells were hatching, and I found that numbers of the extremely minute and just-hatched shells crawled on the feet, and clung to them so firmly that when taken from the water they could not be jarred off, though at a somewhat advanced age they would voluntarily drop off. These just-hatched molluscs, though aquatic in their nature, survived on the duck's feet, in damp air, from twelve to twenty hours; and in this length of time a duck or heron might fly at least six or seven hundred miles, and if blown across the sea to an ocean island, or to any other distant point, would be sure to alight on a pool or rivulet."

Instances no less remarkable than these can be found plentifully in Darwin's writings. Continually we find him making observations which reveal wonderful things in nature; always asking "the why" of things and producing the answer from the study of phenomena, from experiment and from comparison. And Darwin knew much more about the things which he discussed than he could relate. We frequently find him saying some such thing as "I have not space here to enter on this subject," though the matter in question was invariably exceedingly interesting.

Rich as his books are in accumulated instances in proof of his propositions, we never feel for a moment that he has exhausted his supply. We are reminded of Huxley's remark that the great steps in the progress of science "have been made, are made, and will be made, by men who seek knowledge because they crave for it." Darwin thoroughly loved the work which he did, and that is why he did so very much more work than was needful for sustaining his arguments.

A passage in one of the essays of Huxley-Darwin's "gladiator general"-seems hardly justified. It is that wherein he speaks of the Origin of Species as "by no means an easy book to read." A layman's point of view is necessarily different from that of another man of science, to whom, perhaps, some of the facts and the method of handling them may have been familiar. But the assertion may be ventured for what it is worth that this and all the other books of Darwin can be read with abundant pleasure. His style is always lucid, whilst the freshness of his facts, the ingenuity of his experiments, and the play of his mind upon them, are a source of intellectual pleasure as well as of enlightenment. It is, too, a satisfaction to a reader to be led into the great subjects which Darwin investigated by such a perfectly candid author. He modified his opinion on several points in the course of years, and he never sought to maintain a view upon which fresh light enabled him to see differently; so that it is strictly true of him that, as has been said, his "unswerving truthfulness and honesty never permitted him to hide a weak place or gloss over a difficulty, but led him on all occasions to point out the weak places in his own armour, and even sometimes to make admissions against himself which were quite unnecessary."

The Origin of Species presented to the world what Helmholtz described as "an essentially new creative thought,' and though its central idea of evolution evoked somewhat frenzied criticism at the time, it has since become as firmly fixed among scientific concepts as the Copernican system of astronomy or Newton's law of gravitation. The biologist and the geologist of to-day can no more think about the salient facts of their sciences and fit them into any logical plan, without the evolutionary hypothesis, than the navigator can make a voyage without a compass.

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But not only in these fields of knowledge has Evolution