Charles Darwin / by Grant Allen.

  • Allen, Grant, 1848-1899.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Charles Darwin / by Grant Allen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/248 (page 4)
    propounder of the theory which supposes the descent of man to be traceable from a remote and more or less monlcey-like ancestor. Now, as a matter of fact, Darwin was not the prime originator of either of these two great cardinal ideas. Though he held both as part of his organised theory of things, he was not by any means the first or the earliest thinker to hold them or to propound them publicly. Though he gained for them both a far wider and more general acceptance than they had ever before popularly received, he laid no sort of claim himself to originality or proprietorship in either theory. The grand idea which he did really originate was not the idea of £ descent with modifica- tion,’ but the idea of ‘ natural selection,’ by which agency, as he was the first to prove, definite kinds of plants and animals have been slowly evolved from simpler forms, with definite adaptations to the special circumstances by which they are surrounded. In a word, it was the peculiar glory of Charles Darwin, not to have suggested that all the variety of animal and vegetable life might have been produced by slow modi- fications in one or more original types, but to have shown the nature of the machinery by which such a result could be actually attained in the practical working out of natural causes. He did not invent the develop- ment theory, but he made it believable and comprehen- sible. He was not, as most people falsely imagine, the Moses of evolutionism, the prime mover in the biological revolution; he was the Joshua who led the world of thinkers and workers into full fruition of that promised land which earlier investigators had but dimly descried from the Pisgah-top of conjectural speculation.