phenomena of plant and animal life. But Charles Darwin had then just returned from the cruise of the Beagle, and was revolving slowly in his own mind the observations and ideas which blossomed out at last into the "Origin of Species." The germs of evolutionism were already in the air. Lamarck's crude speculations had aroused the attention of all the best biological intellects of the era. Before long Chambers published the "Vestiges of Creation," and Herbert Spencer was hard at work upon the groundwork of the "System of Synthetic Philosophy." The paleontological work of Agassiz, Barraude, Owen, and others, and the general advance in knowledge of comparative anatomy and embryology, paved the way for the triumph of the new ideas; while simultaneously the dry bones of botany were being kindled into life by a younger school of workers in many French and German gardens and laboratories. With the appearance of the "Origin of Species" in 1859, the new departure definitely began. In twenty years the whole world was converted en bloc. Evolution on the organic side has been chiefly expounded in England by Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Wallace; and on the whole, though of worldwide acceptance, it has been a peculiarly English movement. Hitherto, indeed, we Britons have been remarkable as the propounders of the deepest and wisest scientific generalizations: it is only of late years that our bookish educators of the new school have conceived the noble ambition of turning us all into imitation Germans.
Life thus falls into its proper place in the scheme of things as due essentially to the secondary action of radiated solar energy, intercepted on the moist outer crust of a cooling and evolving planet. Its various forms have been gradually produced, mainly by the action of natural selection or survival of the fittest on the immense number of separate individuals ejected from time to time by pre-existing organisms. How the first organisms came to exist at all we can as yet only conjecture; to feeble and unimaginative minds the difficulty of such a conjecture seems grotesquely exaggerated; but granting the existence of a prime organism or group of organisms plus the fact of reproduction with heredity and variations, and the tendency of such reproduction to beget increase in a geometrical ratio, we can deduce from these simple elementary factors the necessary corollary of survival of the fittest, with all its far-reaching and marvelous implications. Our age has discovered for the first time the cumulative value of the infinitesimal. "Many a little makes a mickle"; that was Lyell's key in geology, that was Darwin's key in the science of life. Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Biology" most fully sum up this whole aspect of evolution as applied to the genesis of organic beings.
In 1837, the science of man, and the sciences that gather round the personality of man, had scarcely yet begun to be dreamed of. But evolutionism and geological investigation have revolutionized our conception of our own species and of the place which it holds in the
