The Times/1882/Editorial/Death of Charles Darwin

Layout 2Yesterday, at his quiet Kentish home, one of the greatest of our countrymen passed away. Suddenly and almost without warning the long and noble life of Charles Darwin came to an end. He had reached the age of seventy-three, and though his health, always delicate, had lately shown signs of giving way, he died almost literally in the harness, working to the last. To-day, and for a long time to come, he will be mourned by all those in every land who can appreciate his vast services to knowledge and who honour a lifelong devotion to truth; but with the mourning there will be joined the thought that he was happy in living so long, surrounded by devoted friends, and spared not only to do the work that he had set himself to do, but to it accepted on every side. The storm which howled around "The Origin of Species" at its first appearance has subsided. Even the orthodox are "adapting themselves to their environment," and are beginning to regard Evolution as a hypothesis which may in a measure be harmonized with their first principles. The story of such scenes as those which took place at the celebrated meeting of the British Association at Oxford, in 1860, and of the battle royal between Bishop Wilberforce and the young and ardent Mr. Huxley, reads at the present day like a scene from ancient history; like an episode in the persecution of Galileo, or a preliminary to the execution of Spinoza. The time has gone by when it was conceived possible tp extinguish a scientific hypothesis by authority. Moreover, in little more than twenty years, that which is called Darwinian hypothesis has established itself as, practically speaking, one of the accepted generalizations of science. It is not too much to say that there is no man of real scientific eminence in Europe or America who does not now hold to it in the main. In Germany, in England, in the United States, all that even its former opponents now venture to do is to deny its applicability to certain cases; and in France, though official science still struggles against it, the attitude of the independent works is rather than of accepting Mr. Darwin's views, while giving as much as possible of the credit of them to the Frenchman Lamarck. Nor is it only in the province of exact thought that this fertile idea has take root. All the world now uses Darwinian phrase, which have passed into the language of every day. We tall familiarly of "development," of "the struggle for existence," of the "survival of the fittest." Those who would be at a loss to formulate the theory or to find any facts in support of it, still employ the terms of the new biology with a certain vague understanding of discovers of the past whose names are household words.