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.

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    How far Darwin’s special idea of natural selection supplemented and rendered credible the earlier idea of descent with modification we shall see more fully when we come to treat of the inception and growth of his great epoch-making work, ‘ The Origin of Species; ’ for the present, it must suffice to point out that in the ■world into which he was born, the theory of evolution already existed in a more or less shadowy and un- developed shape. And since it was his task in life to raise this theory from the rank of a mere plausible and happy guess to the rank of a highly elaborate and almost universally accepted biological system, we may pause awhile to consider on the threshold what was the actual state of natural science at the moment when the great directing and organising intelligence of Charles Darwin first appeared. From time immemorial, in modern Christendom at least, it had been the general opinion of learned and simple alike that every species of plant or animal owTed its present form and its original existence to a distinct act of special creation. This naif belief, unsupported as it was by any sort of internal evidence, was supposed to rest directly upon the express authority of a few obscure statements in the Book of Genesis. The Creator, it was held, had in the beginning formed each kind after a particular pattern, had endowed it with special organs devised with supreme wisdom for subserving special functions, and had bestowed upon it the mystical power of reproducing its like in its own image to all generations. No variation of importance ever occurred within the types thus constituted; all plants and animals always retained their special forms unaltered in any