Falling in Love

3. Evolution

Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera

germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question,

it is 'in the air.' It pervades society everywhere with its subtle

essence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its

slang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant

Philistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believes

he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday

conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen,

the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of

authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous

semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin,

and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer--don't you know?--and a

lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the

best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in a

belief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied by

Topsy to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in short,

that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known that in the opinion of

the evolutionists as a body we are all of us ultimately descended from

men with tails, who were the final offspring and improved edition of the

common gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception of the

various points in the great modern evolutionary programme.

It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, who of course

differs fundamentally from that inferior class of human beings known to

all of us in our own minds as 'other people,' that almost every point in

the catalogue thus briefly enumerated is a popular fallacy of the

wildest description. Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than

George Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the electric

telegraph. We are not descended from men with tails, any more than we

are descended from Indian elephants. There is no evidence that we have

anything in particular more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with

our poor relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search of

a 'missing link'; few links are anywhere missing, and those are for the

most part wholly unimportant ones. If we found the imaginary link in

question, he would not be a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. And

so forth generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and current

fallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary teaching. Whatever most

people think evolutionary is for the most part a pure parody of the

evolutionist's opinion.

But a more serious error than all these pervades what we may call the

drawing-room view of the evolutionist theory. So far as Society with a

big initial is concerned, evolutionism first began to be talked about,

and therefore known (for Society does not read; it listens, or rather it

overhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin published his

'Origin of Species.' That great book consisted simply of a theory as to

the causes which led to the distinctions of kind between plants and

animals. With evolution at large it had nothing to do; it took for

granted the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, the

earth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the mountains and

the valleys, nay even life itself in the crude form, everything in fact,

save the one point of the various types and species of living beings.

Long before Darwin's book appeared evolution had been a recognised force

in the moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace had

worked out the development of suns and earths from white-hot

star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface

to its present highly complex geographical condition. Lamarck had worked

out the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow

modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from its

simplest beginnings to its highest outcome in human thought.

But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these things. The

evolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked

for at Mudie's, and permitted to lie on the drawing-room table side by

side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court

memoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them not; the word

evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and refined

dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised only the 'Darwinian theory,'

'natural selection,' 'the missing link,' and the belief that men were

merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon

them. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented and

patented the entire business, including descent with modification, if

such notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large's speculative

intelligence.

Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and older

antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room view would lead us

to imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory indeed, and it

has an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it

back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague and

indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman

poet--the only original poet in the Latin language--did indeed hit out

for himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and

shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it

was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of

the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the

development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all,

but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's camel, out of its author's

own pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt have

built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little

straw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-making

being still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowy

Aladdin's palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary

world of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos into

an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is not thus that systems

arise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for

all time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound

bricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.

It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to

take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,

Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our modern

evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who

led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses

had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the

eighteenth century.

Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical

order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede

in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without a

world to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced to

comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and

matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,

then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly

apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's

crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living

beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid

whisper.

In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this

world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as

the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of

enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world

arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel. The matter of which it was

composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness

that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a

common antibilious pill-box. The pill-box itself, in fact, is the net

result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads of such enormous

cubes of this prim*** matter. Slowly setting around common centres,

however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton's gravitative theories, the

fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat

is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as

they fall perpetually towards the central mass. Just as in a burning

candle the impact of the oxygen atoms in the air against the carbon and

hydrogen atoms in the melted and rarefied wax or tallow produces the

light and heat of the flame, so in nebula or sun the impact of the

various gravitating atoms one against the other produces the light and

heat by whose aid we are enabled to see and know those distant bodies.

The universe, according to this now fashionable nebular theory, began as

a single vast ocean of matter of immense tenuity, spread all alike over

all space as far as nowhere, and comparatively little different within

itself when looked at side by side with its own final historical

outcome. In Mr. Spencer's perspicuous phrase, evolution in this aspect

is a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the

incoherent to the coherent, and from the indefinite to the definite

condition. Difficult words at first to apprehend, no doubt, and

therefore to many people, as to Mr. Matthew Arnold, very repellent, but

full of meaning, lucidity, and suggestiveness, if only we once take the

trouble fairly and squarely to understand them.

Every sun and every star thus formed is for ever gathering in the hem of

its outer robe upon itself, for ever radiating off its light and heat

into surrounding space, and for ever growing denser and colder as it

sets slowly towards its centre of gravity. Our own sun and solar system

may be taken as good typical working examples of how the stars thus

constantly shrink into smaller and ever smaller dimensions around their

own fixed centre. Naturally, we know more about our own solar system

than about any other in our own universe, and it also possesses for us a

greater practical and personal interest than any outside portion of the

galaxy. Nobody can pretend to be profoundly immersed in the internal

affairs of Sirius or of Alpha Centauri. A fiery revolution in the belt

of Orion would affect us less than a passing finger-ache in a certain

single terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall not

apologise in any way for leaving the remainder of the sidereal universe

to its unknown fate, and concentrating my attention mainly on the

affairs of that solitary little, out-of-the-way, second-rate system,

whereof we form an inappreciable portion. The matter which now composes

the sun and its attendant bodies (the satellites included) was once

spread out, according to Laplace, to at least the furthest orbit of the

outermost planet--that is to say, so far as our present knowledge goes,

the planet Neptune. Of course, when it was expanded to that immense

distance, it must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy

human senses can even conceive of. An American would say, too thin; but

I put Americans out of court at once as mere irreverent scoffers. From

the orbit of Neptune, or something outside it, the faint and cloud-like

mass which bore within it C*** and his fortunes, not to mention the

remainder of the earth and the solar system, began slowly to converge

and gather itself in, growing denser and denser but smaller and smaller

as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took

to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel

physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so

for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary

geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that

limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as

far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of one or two

hundred millions, if it comes to that, is not really at all an

appreciable one.

As it condensed and lessened towards its central core, revolving rapidly

on its great axis, the solar mist left behind at irregular intervals

concentric rings or belts of cloud-like matter, cast off from its

equator; which belts, once more undergoing a similar evolution on their

own account, have hardened round their private centres of gravity into

Jupiter or Saturn, the Earth or Venus. Round these again, minor belts or

rings have sometimes formed, as in Saturn's girdle of petty satellites;

or subsidiary planets, thrown out into space, have circled round their

own primaries, as the moon does around this sublunary world of ours.

Meanwhile, the main central mass of all, retreating ever inward as it

dropped behind it these occasional little reminders of its temporary

stoppages, formed at last the sun itself, the main luminary of our

entire system. Now, I won't deny that this primitive Kantian and

Laplacian evolutionism, this nebular theory of such exquisite

concinnity, here reduced to its simplest terms and most elementary

dimensions, has received many hard knocks from later astronomers, and

has been a good deal bowled over, both on mathematical and astronomical

grounds, by recent investigators of nebul and meteors. Observations on

comets and on the sun's surface have lately shown that it contains in

all likelihood a very considerable fanciful admixture. It isn't more

than half true; and even the half now totters in places. Still, as a

vehicle of popular exposition the crude nebular hypothesis in its rawest

form serves a great deal better than the truth, so far as yet known, on

the good old Greek principle of the half being often more than the

whole. The great point which it impresses on the mind is the cardinal

idea of the sun and planets, with their attendant satellites, not as

turned out like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured

intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as due to the

slow and gradual working of natural laws, in accordance with which each

has assumed by force of circumstances its existing place, weight, orbit,

and motion.

The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making,

which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of the

universe at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to the

outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the

astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell

and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's

surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began

by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal

excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it

gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is

growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers. As it passed

from its fiery and volcanic youth to its staider and soberer middle age,

a solid crust began to form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface.

The aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated

mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell.

Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies that

sank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic,

Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the

cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain

ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very

vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more

diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the

homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, with

delightful regularity.

At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, peninsulas and

islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, were wrought out by

internal or external energies on the crust thus generally fashioned.

Evaporation from the oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms;

the water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys and river

basins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into streams, streams into

prim*** Niles, and Amazons, and Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted

here an Alpine chain, or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sediment

washed from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons of

marine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the ocean as soft ooze,

or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or gravel and conglomerate. Now

upheaved into an elevated table-land, now slowly carved again by rain

and rill into valley and watershed, and now worn down once more into

the mere degraded stump of a plateau, the crust underwent innumerable

changes, but almost all of them exactly the same in kind, and mostly in

degree, as those we still see at work imperceptibly in the world around

us. Rain washing down the soil; weather crumbling the solid rock; waves

dashing at the foot of the cliffs; rivers forming deltas at their barred

mouths; shingle gathering on the low spits; floods sweeping before them

the countryside; ice grinding ceaselessly at the mountain top; peat

filling up the shallow lake--these are the chief factors which have gone

to make the physical world as we now actually know it. Land and sea,

coast and contour, hill and valley, dale and gorge, earth-sculpture

generally--all are due to the ceaseless interaction of these separately

small and unnoticeable causes, aided or retarded by the slow effects of

elevation or depression from the earth's shrinkage towards its own

centre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is,

not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue of

successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slow

continuous action of causes still always equally operative.

Evolution in geology leads up naturally to evolution in the science of

life. If the world itself grew, why not also the animals and plants that

inhabit it? Already in the eager active eighteenth century this obvious

idea had struck in the germ a large number of zoologists and botanists,

and in the hands of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin it took form as a

distinct and elaborate system of organic evolution. Buffon had been the

first to hint at the truth; but Buffon was an eminently respectable

nobleman in the dubious days of the tottering monarchy, and he did not

care personally for the Bastille, viewed as a place of permanent

residence. In Louis Quinze's France, indeed, as things then went, a man

who offended the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne was prone to find himself

shortly ensconced in free quarters, and kept there for the term of his

natural existence without expense to his heirs or executors. So Buffon

did not venture to say outright that he thought all animals and plants

were descended one from the other with slight modifications; that would

have been wicked, and the Sorbonne would have proved its wickedness to

him in a most conclusive fashion by promptly getting him imprisoned or

silenced. It is so easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundred

strong and he is one weak unit. Buffon merely said, therefore, that if

we didn't know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, we might

easily have concluded (so fallible is our reason) that animals always

varied slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely accumulated,

would suffice to account for almost any amount of ultimate difference. A

donkey might thus have grown into a horse, and a bird might have

developed from a primitive lizard. Only we know it was quite otherwise!

A quiet hint from Buffon was as good as a declaration from many less

knowing or suggestive people. All over Europe, the wise took Buffon's

hint for what he meant it; and the unwise blandly passed it by as a mere

passing little foolish vagary of that great ironical writer and thinker.

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was no fool; on the

contrary, he was the most far-sighted man of his day in England; he saw

at once what Buffon was driving at; and he worked out 'Mr. Buffon's'

half-concealed hint to all its natural and legitimate conclusions. The

great Count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English contemporary.

Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century since, began in very minute

marine forms, which gradually acquired fresh powers and larger bodies,

so as imperceptibly to transform themselves into different creatures.

Man, he remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits or

pigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by immensely changing

their shapes and colours. If man can make a pouter or a fantail out of

the common runt, if he can produce a piebald lop-ear from the brown wild

rabbit, if he can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannot

Nature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to try with,

produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out of one single common

ancestor? It was a bold idea of the Lichfield doctor--bold, at least,

for the times he lived in--when Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, and

physical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous

touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had the

courage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield,

cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth

century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that

quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants

of a single similar original form, and even that 'one and the same kind

of living filament is, and has been, the cause of organic life.'

The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always laughed at all

reformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a most

eccentric man. His 'Temple of Nature,' now, and his 'Botanic Garden,'

were vastly fine and charming poems--those sweet lines, you know, about

poor Eliza!--but his zoological theories were built of course upon a

most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no sensible person could

ever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius--nothing more; a mere

desire to seem clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of

time has brought around with it! By a strange irony of fate, those

admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza has

survived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and the

zoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fat

shoulders and dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be

the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological science.

In the first year of the present century, Lamarck followed Erasmus

Darwin's lead with an open avowal that in his belief all animals and

plants were really descended from one or a few common ancestors. He held

that organisms were just as much the result of law, not of miraculous

interposition, as suns and worlds and all the natural phenomena around

us generally. He saw that what naturalists call a species differs from

what naturalists call a variety, merely in the way of being a little

more distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners

elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in many

cases one species after another merges into the next on either side of

it. He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man and

the modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going

and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Society

still believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin. In one

point only, a minor point to outsiders, though a point of cardinal

importance to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not

anticipate his more famous successor. He thought organic evolution was

wholly due to the direct action of surrounding circumstances, to the

intercrossing of existing forms, and above all to the actual efforts of

animals themselves. In other words, he had not discovered natural

selection, the cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book. For

him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant reaching up to

the boughs of trees; the monkey had acquired its opposable thumb by

constant grasping at the neighbouring branches; and the serpent had

acquired its sinuous shape by constant wriggling through the grass of

the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by his suggestive

hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, but in so far alone, he

became the real father of modern biological evolutionism.

From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles Darwin himself

published his wonderful 'Origin of Species,' this idea that plants and

animals might really have grown, instead of having been made all of a

piece, kept brewing everywhere in the minds and brains of scientific

thinkers. The notions which to the outside public were startlingly new

when Darwin's book took the world by storm, were old indeed to the

thinkers and workers who had long been familiar with the principle of

descent with modification and the speculations of the Lichfield doctor

or the Paris philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work,

Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every idea which the

drawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin. The supporters of the

development hypothesis, he said seven years earlier--yes, he called it

the 'development hypothesis' in so many words--'can show that

modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all

organisms, subject to modifying influences.' They can show, he goes on

(if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), that any existing

plant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins to undergo adaptive

changes of form and structure; that in successive generations these

changes continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new habits;

that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals changes of the sort

habitually occur; that the differences thus caused, as for example in

dogs, are often greater than those on which species in the wild state

are founded, and that throughout all organic nature there _is_ at work a

modifying influence of the same sort as that which they believed to

have caused the differences of species--'an influence which, to all

appearance, would produce in the millions of years and under the great

variety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of

change.' What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-room

philosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written seven

years before Darwin published the 'Origin of Species.'

The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians before

Darwin. Here are a few of them--Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates,

Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer.

Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. As

well say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Lionardo made the

Italian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as

say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary

movement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousand

predecessors worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped to

diffuse and to confirm his various principles.

Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the special

notion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that while

plants and animals vary perpetually and vary indefinitely, all the

varieties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances of

the species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because

every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the struggle

for life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, because

every point of advantage similarly tells in the individual's favour in

that ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to the

evolutionary concept, fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the

general principle of descent with modification, that won over the whole

world to the 'Darwinian theory.' Before Darwin, many men of science

were evolutionists: after Darwin, all men of science became so at once,

and the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow their

leadership.

As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this--that

plants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitive

living creature, which itself was the product of light and heat acting

on the special chemical constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting from

that single early form, they have gone on developing ever since, from

the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more varied shapes,

till at last they have reached their present enormous variety of tree,

and shrub, and herb, and seaweed, of beast, and bird, and fish, and

creeping insect. Evolution throughout has been one and continuous, from

nebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to man

or elephant. So at least evolutionists say--and of course they ought to

know most about it.

But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not even stop here.

Psychology as well as biology has also its evolutionary explanation:

mind is concerned as truly as matter. If the bodies of animals are

evolved, their minds must be evolved likewise. Herbert Spencer and his

followers have been mainly instrumental in elucidating this aspect of

the case. They have shown, or they have tried to show (for I don't want

to dogmatise on the subject), how mind is gradually built up from the

simplest raw elements of sense and feeling; how emotions and intellect

slowly arise; how the action of the environment on the organism begets a

nervous system of ever greater and greater complexity, culminating at

last in the brain of a Newton, a Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn. Step by

step, nerves have built themselves up out of the soft tissues as

channels of communication between part and part. Sense-organs of

extreme simplicity have first been formed on the outside of the body,

where it comes most into contact with external nature. Use and wont have

fashioned them through long ages into organs of taste and smell and

touch; pigment spots, sensitive to light or shade, have grown by

infinite gradations into the human eye or into the myriad facets of bee

and beetle; tremulous nerve-ends, responsive sympathetically to waves of

sound, have tuned themselves at last into a perfect gamut in the

developed ear of men and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient

centres have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture flashed

by an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed from the sensitive

mirror of the retina, through the many-stranded cable of the optic

nerve, straight up to the appropriate headquarters in the thinking

brain. Stage by stage the continuous process has gone on unceasingly,

from the jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite

steps of progression, induced by ever-widening intercourse with the

outer world, to the final outcome in the senses and the emotions, the

intellect and the will, of civilised man. Mind begins as a vague

consciousness of touch or pressure on the part of some primitive,

shapeless, soft creature: it ends as an organised and co-ordinated

reflection of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part of

a great cosmical philosopher.

Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take to

politics. Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growth

of suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, and

plants, and animals, and minds, they proceed to show us the exactly

analogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, and

languages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and

literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others

have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from his

early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of

fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the

earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became

the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the

tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his

excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the

horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings in

the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and the

coco-nut. He picked and improved the seeds of his wild cereals till he

made himself from grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, his

Indian corn. In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the use

first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze, and iron.

Side by side with these long secular changes, he evolved the family,

communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monogamous. He built the hut, the

house, and the palace. He clothed or adorned himself first in skins and

leaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of all in purple

and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. He gathered into

hordes, tribes, and nations; he chose himself a king, gave himself laws,

and built up great empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raised

him altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into

hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps,

into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His

dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his

boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and

his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the

telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution

has really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly

historical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian,

French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of

the trireme, the 'Great Harry,' the 'Victory,' and the 'Minotaur' from

the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.

The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of all

things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one word

evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any other

single thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, all

working up, though some of them unconsciously, towards a grand final

unified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the

Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology,

Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology,

Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor,

Lubbock, and De Mortillet--these have been the chief evolutionary

teachers and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, and

the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system of

philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one man

alone--Herbert Spencer. Many other minds--from Galileo and Copernicus,

from Kepler and Newton, from Linn** and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and

Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius--had been

piling together the vast collection of raw material from which that

great and stately superstructure was to be finally edified. But the

architect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned and

designed the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the

rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the author

of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,' and none other. It is a strange

proof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among the

thousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are

probably aware that both word and conception are alike due to the

commanding intelligence and vast generalising power of Herbert Spencer.