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The educated world mourns the loss of a great scientist whose name has been a household word for many years, and whose fame will be an enduring one. Charles, Darwin, who has just passed quietly away at his home in Kent, was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable men of this country, and the startling theory that he first published to the world some three and twenty years ago has given such an impetus to biological research and opened up such a vista into nature's mysteries that new facts are being daily recorded, and man's sphere of knowledge sensibly widened. The storm that greeted the first appearance of "The Origin of Species" and raged with almost unabated fury for years has now given place to a calm that is rarely disturbed, and even the staunchest of the author's opponents have been compelled to admit that some of his most severely assailed deductions have stood the test of examination and criticism. In a few words Darwin's main contention is that the various species of plants and animals, not excluding man, instead of being each specially created and immutable, are continually suffering change through a process of adaptation, by which those varieties of a species that are in any way better fitted for the conditions of their life survive and multiply at the expense of others. This doctrine of the survival of the fittest was followed some years later on by his work on the "Descent of Man," in which he boldly declared, to the dismay of orthodox believers, that man had descended from lower types of life. After detailing the various steps taken in arriving at such a conclusion, he says, "we must acknowledge that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extended not only to other men, but to the humblest living creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system─ with all these exalted powers, man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his low origin. The shock that was experienced in most religious circles at such assertions as these has not yet wholly died away, but there is a growing tendency to attempt the reconciliation of his conclusions with the faith, the hope, and the belief of the Christian, whilst with regard to his extreme conclusions it is needless to say that it will require much more proof than has hitherto been advanced to convince mankind that evolution alone is the sole cause of life as it at present exists.