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CHARLES DARWIN.

THE death of Mr. Darwin on Thursday of last week cannot be called either sudden or premature, as we ordinarily use such expressions, because his health was known to have been for some time feeble, and not only had he more than completed his three-score-and-ten years but his life had been rich in achievement, and crowned with success such as has seldom been vouchsafed to mortal man. The news of his death must, nevertheless, have impressed every one with a sense of sudden bereavement, for the world never gets ready to lose such a man; and when we consider how fresh Mr. Darwin's mind was, and how much more he would have been sure to do if he could have lived to the age of Hobbes or Fontenelle we must really characterize his death as premature. The great book of which the 'Origin of Species' was designed as a preliminary sketch, he had indeed given up all thought of writing, because so much had been accomplished by the preliminary sketch that further work upon the general theory might well be left to other hands, the whole scientific world having become, to a great extent, Mr. Darwin's collaborateurs. But during the last years of his life Mr. Darwin has published several monographs of the highest value and interest, summing up the results of half a century of patient observation and sagacious reflection upon sundry obscure but important points in botany and vegetable physiology, and there is no reason for supposing that he had as yet begun to exhaust this treasure-house of rich experiences. On the contrary, it seems quite likely that he may have left behind numerous notes and fragments, from which valuable posthumous papers may be edited.

The career of Mr. Darwin possesses the interest that belongs to a complete and well-rounded tale. Lake his great predecessor and ally, Sir Charles Lyell, he was never obliged to contend with pecuniary anxieties or to engage in any bread-winning occupation, but he was able to devote whole life with a single mind to the pursuit of scientific truth. It therefore became possible for him to furnish an admirable illustration of Buffon's definition of a great life, "une pensée de la jeunesse réalisée dans l'âge mûr." After taking his Master' degree at Cambridge, in 1831, at the age of twenty-two, he set out in the ship Beagle on an exploring voyage around the world, accompanying the expedition voluntarily as naturalist. In the course of this voyage Mr. Darwin was struck by the peculiar relations of the floras and faunas of the Galapagos Islands to one another and to the flora and fauna of the South American Continent, and these facts set him to speculating as to the possibility of an actual kinship among these organisms—a question which involved the whole problem of the origin of species by "descent with modifications." The most considerable part of Mr. Darwin' life-work was comprised in the solution of the problems thus early suggested by the study of the Galapagos Islands. But a long time was to elapse before the world was to hear, either of the problems or of the solution. After his return to England in 1836, Mr. Darwin was for some time occupied with publications describing the scientific results of the expedition, in which he was assisted by Owen, Waterhouse, Bell, Hooker, and other eminent naturalists. In the series of volumes which appeared under his direction between 1840 and 1845, three were by Mr. Darwin' own hand—the "Geological Observations on South America,' the work on 'Volcanic Islands,' and especially the treatise on 'Coral Reefs,' in which the true theory of the formation of the reefs was for the first time propounded, and in which new light was thrown upon areas of subsidence and of elevation in all parts of the globe. In 1851–53 Mr. Darwin published a 'Monograph of the Cirripedia,' and at about the same time monographs of the fossil balanidæ, cerrucidæ and pedunculated cirripeds of Great Britain. In 1853 he received the royal medal from the Royal Society, and in 1859 the Wollaston medal from the Geological Society, and by this time his name had already come to be ranked with those of the most distinguished living naturalists, so that when the 'Origin of Species' was published it at once attracted attention by reason of the eminence of its author, even before its transcendent merits had had time to become known.

A quarter of a century had now elapsed since Mr. Darwin had turned his attention to the problem of the origin of species in connection with the facts of geographical distribution and geological succession. Fifteen years had passed away since he had written out, without publishing, a brief sketch of some of the principal points of the theory which has since become so famous. How much longer this silence might have lasted, had not an unforeseen circumstance come in to break it, one cannot say; but no doubt it would have lasted some time longer, for Mr. Darwin did not wish to publish his views until he had thoroughly considered all the leading facts and arguments which might be regarded as bearing upon them, and it is quite evident that when he wrote the 'Origin of Species' he did not realize the wonderful maturity which his argument had attained, or the overwhelming cogency with which he was then presenting it. It was quite characteristic of him to have made so many allowances for inevitable incompleteness of his work, when judged by a standard of absolute perfection, as to render himself incapable for the time being of appreciating its real magnitude. In writing the, 'Origin of Species, he regarded it as a preliminary outline of his theory, which would serve to prevent his being forestalled by others in the announcement of it, and he made frequent allusion to the larger and more elaborate treatise by which he should presently follow up the exposition. There can be no doubt that Mr. Darwin was surprised at the great fame which his book instantly won, and at the quickness with which it carried conviction to the minds of nearly all men living whose opinions on the subject were worth, the trouble of influencing. The success of his theory was instantaneous and complete; and before ten years more had passed by, so many able men had become expounders and illustrators of the doctrine of natural selection that it no longer seemed necessary to write the larger and more elaborate treatise. The learned work on the 'Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,' which appeared in 1868, in two octavo volumes, formed the first instalment of this long-projected treatise. The second part was to have treated of the variation of animals and plants through natural selection, and a third part would have dealt with the phenomena of morphology, of classification, and of distribution in space and time. But these second and third parts were never published.

The circumstance which caused Mr. Darwin to publish the 'Origin of Species' in 1859 served, no less than the extraordinary success of his book, to show how ripe the world had become for the publication of such views. In 1858 Mr. Wallace, who was engaged in studying the natural history of the Malay Archipelago, sent to Mr. Darwin a paper in which he sketched the outlines of a theory identical with that upon which Mr. Darwin had so long been at work. Coincidences of this sort have not been uncommon in the history of scientific inquiry; nor is it surprising that they should occur now and then, when we reflect that a great and pregnant discovery most always have close relations with some question which many of the foremost minds in the world are busy in thinking about. It was so with the discovery of the differential calculus with the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics; and to a considerable extent it was so with the introduction of the new chemistry, with the discovery of the equivalence of heat and motion, and with spectrum analysis. It was peculiarly so with the doctrine of the origin of species through natural selection. The belief that all species have originated through derivation from other species, and not through special creations, had been held by a certain portion of the scientific world ever since the time of Mr. Darwin's famous grandfather, who was one of its earliest and most conspicuous advocates. Even those naturalists who did not hold this belief cannot in general be said to have held any antagonistic belief, inasmuch as the so-called "doctrine of special creations" is not a positive doctrine at all, but a mere confession of ignorance, and was so regarded by scientific naturalists before 1859. The truth is, that before the publication of the 'Origin of Species' there was no opinion whatever current respecting the subject that deserved to be called a scientific hypothesis. That the higher forms of life must have come by some process of development from simpler forms was in itself a sensible—perhaps the only sensible—view to take of the subject; but there is nothing properly scientific in a vague general opinion of this sort. A scientific hypothesis must allege a true cause whereby to account for a group of phenomena. Before 1859 no one had suggested a true cause for the origination of new species, but the problem was one over which every naturalist had puzzled since the beginning of the century. Hence the completeness and swiftness of Mr. Darwin's success. But Mr. Darwin's originality was as complete as his success, and it embraced the entire scientific conception of the development theory. He did even more than allege a vera causa in natural selection. He was the first to marshal the arguments from classification, embryology, morphology, and distribution, and thus fairly to establish the fact that there has been a derivation of higher forms from lower; and he was also the first to point out the modus operandi of the change. The first of these achievements by itself would have entitled him to associate his name with the development theory, but by the second the triumph of the theory was practically assured.

It is a remarkable illustration of the thoroughness with which Mr. Darwin considered his great theory before publishing an account of it that, during the twenty-three years which have elapsed since 1859, although a vast literature of controversy has come into existence and "Darwinism" has formed one of the chief subjects of discussion in all the civilized countries of the world, no one as yet seems to have discovered any argument against the theory of natural selection which Mr. Darwin had not himself already foreseen and considered in the first edition of the 'Origin of Species.' In 1871, Mr. St. George Mivart published a book which made a slight sensation for a few weeks, and which deserves notice as an attack upon the Darwinian theory couched in the language of scientific argument rather than in that of general philosophy or theology or æsthetics; yet all Mr. Mivart' serious objections were taken from Mr. Darwin's own pages and freshly urged with singular want of candor.

After an interval of twelve years Mr. Darwin followed up the first announcement of his general views with his treatise on the 'Descent of Man.' If his earlier book was preëminent for the skill with which it grouped great masses of

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facts in their bearings upon a few general propositions relating to the whole organic world, the later treatise is no less remarkable for the skill with which it weighs great numbers of different and often heterogeneous considerations in their bearings upon a single enormously complex group of phenomena. Mr. Darwin's latest books belong to a period in which, having lived to witness the complete success of his great work, he has employed his time in recording the results of his researches on many subsidiary points of no little interest and importance. The treatises on 'Insectivorous Plants,' on 'Cross and Self-Fertilization,' on the 'Different Forms of Flowers,' and on the 'Formation of Vegetable Mould,' should be read as models of sound scientific method, by every one who cares to learn what scientific method is.

There can be little doubt that Mr. Darwin's name will go down in history as that of the greatest scientific inquirer and the most pregnant scientific thinker that has lived since Newton. Since the beginnings of modem learning, probably no single idea has wrought upon the minds of men with such rich and manifold results as the idea of "natural selection" and it is evident that what we have already seen is but an earnest of vastly more that is to come.