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

of fact; and every botanist who saw the spectacle was amused. Most philosophical minds could unite on the charge that Darwin, when he ascribed all evolution to chance variations, was guilty of lese-majesty in metaphysics. To this day there are minds that reiterate the charge against Darwin's horrible use of chance. But they are minds blindly hurling themselves against a granitic fact. Darwin had frequently explained in the Origin that he used chance in the most strict and proper scientific sense

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

charmed afresh. There was in Wallace's nature a beauty that will shine when the splendor of Agassiz and the greatness of Lyell are dim. He never laid claim to more honor than the Linn an paper gave him, and so gained a higher kind of fame than scientific discovery can bring. He was right in giving thanks that fate had not made him the leader of the evolution army. For such a part he lacked every qualification. He had small sagacity for sifting false men from true ones, small endurance of the

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

, poor man, could not comprehend it, but said that all young Frenchmen would hear or believe nothing else. The younger men in England were almost solidly in its favor by 1870 at least so far as to agree that there had been an evolution of species and that no other explanation of the process had been offered which could compare with natural selection. Prominent clergymen were reconciling Darwinism with religion. Darwin could feel sure that his theory was firmly grounded and that, except in

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

quite unknown and that his theory was independent of the cause just as Huxley said it was. This would be a technical question that should have no discussion in a biography if it was not now the most talked-about part of Darwin's theory. It is very commonly said nowadays that Darwin, late in life, accepted Lamarck's view of the nature of inheritance, that the view is now known to be wrong, and that therefore Darwin's theory has a big hole in it. In recent books about evolution there is an

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

extraordinary ways to complement each other and live by each other's adaptations. The importance of the book as a proof of evolution was not understood by most readers at the time of its publication. When Darwin received Asa Gray's report on it the replied: Of all the carpenters for knocking the right nail on the head you are the very best; no one else has perceived that my chief interest in my orchid book has been that it was a flank movement on the enemy. Each one of the botanical books that

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

purposes. To scientific readers of the Origin it had appeared that Darwin was speculating; he now offered the array of facts from which he had argued. The book was published in January, 1868. It is by no means a proof of evolution. Darwin was never able to arrive at a proof. He could only point to probabilities and say, Do you know any facts that make my idea improbable? Have you any other theory to propose? The probability pointed out in Animals and plants is that the variations seen by

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

stillborn it will, thank God, at some future time reappear, begotten by some other father, and christened by some other name. The name genes, which students of heredity now use, is the second syllable of the name of Darwin's hypothesis. 5. The Descent of Man In the Origin there is only the briefest reference to the evolution of man. Darwin had planned to say nothing about this disagreeable subject, for he did not wish to rouse more theological fury against himself than necessary. But, feeling that

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

get away from the Origin to some other sort of book. Darwin never got away. All his writing was designed to supplement and buttress the argument of his first book on the evolution theory. The Descent of Man appeared in 1871, and a second edition in 1874. In the preface to the second edition he mentions the fiery ordeal through which the book had passed. The only reply he makes to the critics is in reference to the subject of which you are now weary variation. It seems that the critics had been

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

the only factor in evolution. But such statements are in the nature of an admission; they give the impression that the author is a little sorry, that his heart is not in what he is saying. He never reports with enthusiasm any observation of his own which seems to show inheritance of use. If he talks of natural selection of chance variations in the rostellum of Catasetum, he grows lyrical with an excitement that electrifies the reader: but all he can say of direct action of conditions is that it

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

can the differences between the races of man be accounted for by the inherited effects of the increased or decreased use of parts, except to a quite insignificant degree. When you write your next criticism of Mr. Darwin you will have to say that you can not detect any real change in his feeling about the factors of Buffon and Lamarck. Only two hundred and eight pages of the book are devoted to the evolution of man. Then follow four hundred and thirty pages on the theory of Sexual Selection

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

the books made after 1868, but on Darwin's honesty and directness of purpose. If he had positively or fully included in any concrete book any substantial change of view that made any difference in his reasoning, I should suppose he would at least call attention to the new arrival that had taken up its abode amidst his conceptions of evolution. He nowhere points out any such novelty. When I read the books five years ago I had no suspicion of anything new in his theory after 1859. When I now turn

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

Cambridge University Press, page 22.) You will search Weismann's essays in vain for any statement that Darwin altered his theory after 1859. By what magical insight could a modern critic find it? Osborn's strange interpretation of a few sentences in letters has been a boomerang. It just suited the purpose of such anti-evolution writers as Louis T. More and Father O'Toole. They have used it as an aid in proving that Darwin's reputation is damaged and that his theory id dead. They have hurled it

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

last book on evolution he has reached the mark he first proposed to himself when planning the campaign: Show that plants are like animals. The idea of a rootlet having a brain amused Hooker, of course, but it also astounded him. It opened before him a new prospect of the unity of all life. Hooker and Gray, the world's foremost botanists, were the ones who were quickest to perceive the novelty and immeasurable significance of Darwin's investigation of the movements and flower-forms and

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

laws. But organic nature still remained beyond law, a field for a riot of superstition. Darwin, in his study, concluding his first sketch of an evolution theory, set down his hope of the good it might [page break

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

. 4. George A. Dorsey's The Evolution of Charles Darwin, issued in May, 1927, is more than twice as large as Huxley's book, tells four times as much, and is packed with many delightful quotations. Dr. Dorsey's attack on the subject is by way of behaviorism: The problem is to ascertain what factors inevitably and necessarily preceded this or that form of his behavior. VI. BOOKS BY CHARLES DARWIN, A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST 1839. Journal and Remarks, as Vol. III of Fitz-Roy's Narrative of the Voyages

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A876 Book: Abbott, Lawrence F. 1927. Charles Darwin, the saint. In Ibid. Twelve great modernists. New York: Doubleday. Text Image PDF

happiness in this world is legitimate for every human being, and that the main function of government is to protect and further men in that pursuit by securing to the community health, education, wholesome productive labour and liberty. I make no attempt to appraise or interpret the doctrine of evolution. The origin of man, if not the origin of species is still a physical and metaphysical mystery. But no thinking person now questions the biological fact that in nature there is a law of development

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

about priority in developing a theory of evolution. But such facts are quite secondary and partial. Here, at the outset, I want to display the chief meaning of Darwin's career: that the result of his fifty years of observing nature was to teach the world not to rely on Speculation. I am the more anxious to do this because every book about Darwin or his theory implies the contrary. A fair [page] 2

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

animated nature. The course is, in general, always steady, always the same; its movement, always regulated, rotates upon two unshakable pivots one, the boundless fertility given to every species; the other, the numberless obstructions which reduce the product of this fertility by a fixed rate, and leave, in the whole course of time, only about the same quantity of individuals in every species. (Tome VI, page 247.) Even a modern scientist would admit that the embryo of an evolution theory is in another

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

it. Educated people in general still take it for granted that in the good old days of its youth this globe was a fearsomely active place, where volcanic cataclysms rent the frame of things, heaving up mountains with prodigious suddenness, en- * John W. Judd heard this precious anecdote from Darwin's own it on page 72 of The Coming of Evolution. [page] 7

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

development was a doctrine of sudden and sweeping alterations, great leaps in crea- * In Lyell's correspondence there are two statements that might seem, to an unwary reader who took words in their modern connotation, to admit a belief in progressive development, and on these exceptional fragments Professor Judd has built his faith that Lyell was an evolutionist in 1831. But all the other letters and all of the Principles show unmistakably that Lyell was utterly opposed to an evolution theory. And