Search Results - The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

written himself down for posterity as one who cared not at all for the mysteries of the universe in which he lived. He was blind and deaf and unfeeling in the midst of the marvels which all sensitive minds of the period were puzzling about. And this curse of the blindness of a good intellect was transmitted to his grandson, Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon, who has written a book a captivating scholarship, Evolution Old and New, to reprimand Charles Darwin once more for being something much

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

character and ever read the thoughts of those with whom he came into contact with extraordinary acuteness. And the grandfather was a daring speculator about the nature of life, and how an organism is generated from its parents, and what the ancestry of all life has been. Such speculations as the Lamarckian views on evolution were no novelty in the brain of this boy who was to enjoy a week of stage-coaching to the capital of Scotland. But it is doubtful whether biology and philosophy occupied his

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

CHAPTER II WHY YOUNG DARWIN WAS ASTONISHED AT DR. GRANT IF I were reading about Darwin's career, I should want an early chapter to give me a background of his life the guesses about evolution which were in the air when he was a youth. So I have made such a chapter and inserted it here. But I suspect that many of my readers will be happier if they omit it for the present. It should never be read by any one until he feels curiosity about the subject. You might try a few paragraphs, and then skip

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

simply knew that those fanciful theories were regarded with skepticism by the learned world. Dr. Darwin was a skeptic about medical superstitions. He had taught his sons the folly of seeking for a philosopher's stone or a miraculous widow's cruse of energy. So his sons would have been astounded to hear from any savant an argument in favor of those doctrines. In 1825 the Lamarckian view of evolution seemed a similar sort of folly to Dr. Darwin and his sons. The transmutation of species whether of

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

praise J. J. Thomson for discovering facts which indicate that the one simple basis of all metals is electricity. In one sense he has merely proved the truth of the alchemists' theory. Yet the theory was only an idle dream; it was nonsense to Thomson and Rutherford; it did not direct their researches. Their fame was not earned by espousing a doctrine, but by discovering something about natural law in the universe. The theory of evolution is a parallel case. It was as old as Aristotle. No one

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

ceeding with the account of Darwin's youth I will give one further illustration of how the whole meaning of his life has been distored by a philosophizing world. Prof. John W. Judd, in his The Coming of Evolution, relates that he once fell in talk with Matthew Arnold, who exclaimed, I cannot understand why you scientific people make such a fuss about Darwin. Why, it's all in Lucretius. When Judd argued that Lucretius had guessed what Darwin proved, Arnold retorted, Ah! that only shows how much

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

Shrewsbury, who did not even credit (what is still widely believed among intelligent people) that a violent emotion in the mind of a pregnant woman can produce a corresponding effect in the embryo. Imagine, then, how the notion would cast a ludicrous hue upon other ideas in Zoonomia for instance, upon the idea of an evolution of all living beings from one simple primary form. Dr. Erasmus Darwin set forth that idea in several of the notes to the poems and in several passages of Zoonomia. I will cite

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

species, from a primordial filament, would seen unfounded to a boy who challenged The Wonders of the World and who admired an unspeculative father. Surely a Matthew Arnold could not believe that a Darwinian theory was all in Zoonomia. The theory of Erasmus Darwin gained no credence. It was styled Darwinising by Coleridge and (says krause) was accepted in England nearly as the antithesis of sober biological investigation. Arnold could have argued somewhat plausibly, however, that an evolution theory

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

ure. He liked to reread and chuckle over the passage during the Yuletide of 1832, while the tempest shrieked about him and the Beagle tugged with all her might against three anchors. It is delightful. In the century since Lamarck died no man has penned an attack on the evolution theory that is more accurate, more concise, or more full of contempt. Darwin was happy about it. It proved the silliness of Dr. Grant's high admiration of Lamarck. The chapter fully conceded the naturalness of the very

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

, of Darwin's lines of reasoning was concerned with the marvelous ways in which seeds and eggs may be preserved and transported. Lyell offered some astonishing facts about modes of dispersal. 5. The most spectacular and romantic sort of evidence for evolution is the series of changes through which every organism goes when it is an embryo: in its own individual life it seems to pass through evolutionary stages. Lyell took stock of this evidence and argued that it is an illusion, a mere

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

Antarctic), and for the next eighteen days Darwin was in close contact with savages. His brain was struck with sights and feelings that grew more potent as the years passed by. They formed, at the time, a very curious background for Lyell's discourse on the divinity and gentlemanlikeness of the human species. They may have been, twenty years later, a deeper basis for reasoning about evolution than Darwin was conscious of. More than a twentieth of his Journal is devoted to these days with the Fuegians

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

about evolution were taking shape here in Darwin's mind, he could not have written with more feeling about the generally diabolical aspect of the islands. Our eyes and imagination were engrossed by the strange wildness of the view; for in such a place Vulcan might have worked. Amidst the most confusedly heaped masses of lava, black and barren, as if hardly yet cooled, innumerable craters showed their very regular, even artificial-looking, heaps. It was like immense iron works, on a Cyclopian

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

Dr. Hooker informs me that the flora has an undoubted Western American character; nor can he detect in it any affinity with that of the Pacific. The following paragraph merits the closest attention and two readings. It challenges the assumption made by all previous reasoners about evolution that similar environments will produce similar results on life. It asks why a creative power should so strangely limit its inventiveness to South American models. We see that this archipelago, though

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

compete in the struggle for existence. There was always a satisfaction of another sort to cheer Darwin on while he ploughed through the monographs and moistened the thousands of dry specimens for dissection. He was becoming a specialist who could not be snubbed by the Owens and Mivarts who would assail his evolution theory. When he returned from the Beagle voyage he was an amateur in every biological field. Mr. Don remarked on the beautiful appearance of some plant with an astounding long name. Some

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

differences, I should not be much surprised if the present form were to turn out to be a mere vairety. 140. As the majority of authors have ranked the two common species under two distinct genera, I may observe that there is no good ground for this separation. 1. Thomas Henry Huxley Now, as a little recess before you read of the next two years of barnacles, you may travel round the world with a young man who is preparing himself to be a champion of evolution. When Darwin set out for Edinburgh in

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

probability that every species has originated by growing out of a previous species. He could not prove this. Even to-day no demonstration is possible. The method of argument, for Darwin as for us now, is to show the strong probability that species evolved from one another and that all life is part of one continuous pattern. Hence an evolution theory is never satisfactory to a rigidly philosophical mind, for it is logically incomplete. This was the first of Darwin's difficulties as he set to

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

thousand barnacles been sent out of the house in September, 1854, than he began to look over the old notes and plan an order of assembling them in a book. He expected to write a large and very thorough book, presenting full data from his piles of notes. Where should he begin? Obviously the beginning of evolution is in those differences that always exist between a parent and its offspring: no tree was ever precisely like its mother; no child ever had the same fingerprint as its father. Between

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

run along smoothly and present a rather obvious idea: The most common species oftenest give rise to varieties. This is what any one nowadays who is familiar with evolution would naturally guess to be the case. If, for example, the Falk- [page] 27

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

maelstrom of authority in which Darwin was whirled. Yet he and Dana were right. Dana's knowledge and force were so much respected that he was a powerful ally. Modern geology teaches, as a basic truth, the theory of Dana and Darwin that the continents have always been approximately what they are to-day. These tournaments among the champions of evolution have put into the history of science a kind of glory that is all too rare in the records of disputation. Huxley once expressed the spirit with which they

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A179 Book: Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray. Text Image

intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armoring. After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath: Lyell's approval, and perhaps in a small way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows, who would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. Certain of the members occupied themselves diligently during the next two years in furbishing and sharpening their arms against the next occasion when this Evolution