6

may be said to have fairly begun with the Oxford meeting of the British Association, or to do justice to those who fought, not only for Darwin, but for the right of free thought and free expression of opinion in science. One aspect of the struggle may be briefly noticed-the influence of the personality of the chief scientific opponent in this country. Although the authorship was never publicly acknowledged, it is generally believed that the article in the Edinburgh Review' for April 1860 was written by the great comparative anatomist, Sir Richard Owen. It is interesting to compare the effect upon Darwin and Huxley of these two highly influential attacks delivered within a few months of the appearance of the 'Origin.' Huxley's scathing criticism of the 'Quarterly,' already referred to, stands in marked contrast to his brief but respectful allusion to the Edinburgh."* Darwin, on the other hand, spoke in friendly terms of the Quarterly,' but bitterly resented the 'false and malignant attack' in the 'Edinburgh.'‡ On the subject of this article he wrote, April 10, 1860, to Sir C. Lyell : 'I have just read the "Edinburgh," which without doubt is by It is extremely malignant, clever, and I fear will be very damaging. He is atrociously severe on Huxley's lecture, and very bitter against Hooker. So we three enjoyed it together. Not that I really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for one night; but I have got quite over it today. It requires much study to appreciate all the bitter spite of many of the remarks against me; indeed I did not discover all myself. It scandalously misrepresents many parts. He misquotes some passages, altering words within inverted commas. It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which hates me.' ('Life and Letters,' ii,

6

300, 301.)

Darwin's resentment, deepened by the apparent friendliness of one who was writing so maliciously, § did not abate for many years. The most bitter words, almost the only bitter words, known to be used by him, were uttered in a conversation preserved in the memory of

* Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,' ii, 184.

† Ib. ii, 324, 325.

§ I never shall forget his cordial shake of the hand, when he was writing as spitefully as he possibly could against me.' In a letter to Sir Joseph Hooker, April 23, 1861. ('More Letters,' i, 185.)

my friend Mr Roland Trimen, F.R.S. They are not words that, coming from such a source, the hearer would be likely to forget:

first

At Down, about the end of the year 1867, when conversing
with Mr Darwin about the already steadily increasing accep-
tance of the "Origin" among thinking naturalists, in contrast
to the active hostility it encountered on and long after its
appearance only eight years before, I referred to the
bary artillery brought to bear against it in the "Quarterly"
and "Edinburgh" Reviews, besides the host of other dis-
charges from arms of minor calibre. Mr Darwin asked me if
I knew who wrote the "Edinburgh" article, and on my reply-
ing that I did not, but that I had heard Owen's name sug-
gested amongst others, he said, "Owen was the man." I
ventured to enquire whether he came to this conclusion from
other evidence than that afforded by the style, tone, etc., of
the article itself; and he answered, "The internal evidence
but when I taxed him with the authorship and he absolutely
made me almost sure that only Owen could have written it;
denied it-then I was quite certain." Words of such keen
satire came with extraordinary effect from a man so emin-
ently gentle and considerate, and so free from any touch of
jealousy or self-assertion as Darwin. They made a deep and
lasting impression

on me-all the more because they were

spoken very quietly and deliberately, and because they were the only words of censure I heard used by the greatest of

naturalists'

There can be little doubt that Owen's hostility arose from jealousy excited by the universal interest which the 'Origin' inspired; and, when scientific opinion showed unmistakable signs of changing, Owen began to announce the evidences of evolution on his own account.

If he had

at the same time withdrawn from his former attitude a place in the memory of future generations beside that and acknowledged his debt to Darwin, Owen would have of the illustrious geologist Lyell.

As it is, we must feel

Some regret that he did not, like Louis Agassiz and Sir
W. Dawson, keep up the fight to the very end. The

talked about. What a strange man to be envious of a naturalist like
The Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book has been
self, immeasurably his inferior! From one conversation with him, I
really suspect he goes, at the bottom of his hidden soul, as far as I do.' In a
letter from Darwin to Prof. Henslow, May 8, 1860. ('More Letters,' i, 149.)

greatness of the change since Owen's day is forced upon us by the vain attempt to imagine any living naturalist moved to deep resentment by evidences of evolution of any kind.

A beautiful and remarkable example of the silent irresistible power of the 'Origin' is to be found in the intellectual transformation-accomplished with 'severe pain and disappointment-of the great botanist George Bentham. Twenty-three years after its beginning, the story of this change was first made known in Bentham's letter to Francis Darwin (May 30, 1882):

'On the day that his [Charles Darwin's] celebrated paper was read at the Linnean Society, July 1st, 1858, a long paper of mine had been set down for reading, in which, in commenting on the British Flora, I had collected a number of observations and facts illustrating what I then believed to be a fixity in species, however difficult it might be to assign their limits, and showing a tendency of abnormal forms, produced by cultivation or otherwise, to withdraw within those original limits when left to themselves. Most fortunately my paper had to give way to Mr Darwin's, and when once that was read, I felt bound to defer mine for reconsideration. I began to entertain doubts on the subject, and on the appearance of the "Origin of Species" I was forced, however reluctantly, to give up my long-cherished convictions, the results of much labour and study, and I cancelled all that part of my paper which urged original fixity.' ('Life and Letters,' ii, 294.)

As regards scenes such as that described at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, the first and second quarter centuries since the first appearance of the 'Origin' seem to be separated by all the ages. In the clear apprehension of the central teachings of Darwin the contrast between them is less pronounced. Writing to Sir Joseph Hooker, on December 14, 1859, Darwin described the effect of the 'Origin' upon John Edward Gray, keeper of the zoological collections of the British Museum:

'Old J. E. Gray, at the British Museum, attacked me in fine style: "You have just reproduced Lamarck's doctrine, and nothing else, and here Lyell and others have been attacking him for twenty years, and because you (with a sneer and a laugh) say the very same thing, they are all coming round; it is the most ridiculous inconsistency," etc. (Ib. ii, 243, 244.)

It is evident that Gray supposed selection to be some sort of deliberate choice made by animals themselves, and that it fell into line with Lamarck's conception of desire and effort as motive causes of evolution. Thus Darwin wrote, concerning the same naturalist, to Sir Charles Lyell:

'Dr Gray... remarked to me that "selection was obviously
impossible with plants! No one could tell him how it could
be possible!" And he may now add that the author did not
attempt it to him!' (Life and Letters,' ii, 346.)

A mistake similar to J. E. Gray's was made by numbers
of writers; indeed the majority of the early criticisms,
supposed to be aimed at Darwin, in reality strike
Lamarck. Such obvious misconceptions are not met
with to-day, but the more intricate operations of natural
appear as foolishness to some, a stumbling-
block to others. To consider a single striking example;
Prof. J. M. Coulter, writing in the American memorial
volume itself on the water-conducting vessels of plants,
says on pages 62 and 63:

selection still

In..... these cases the structures do not perform their very important functions until the cells are dead. Just how a group of dead cells, performing a mechanical function, could have been built up by Natural Selection, is hard to imagine; its

two great divisions of the plant kingdom.' It is strange that Prof. Coulter should find any difficulty in the selection of potentialities which only become actual when the living, growing tissue has become a lifeless skeleton. The operation is perfectly simple. A plant, developing certain cells which, after their death, possess a greater efficiency than those of another plant, tends to survive and transmit the potentiality, and ultimately the superior efficiency, to its offspring. Hence it a by no means hard to imagine how by the aid of natural selection, the complex feathers of birds and the waterconducting vessels of plants 'may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.'

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If these things

are done in the green tree what shall be done in the dry? When a most distinguished botanist finds such conceptions of evolution hard to understand, what are likely to be the difficulties of men far less eminent?

The twenty-one years of thought, observation, and experiment, which intervened between Darwin's discovery of natural selection in October 1838 and the publication of the Origin of Species' on November 24, 1859, gave to the new views a maturity remarkable in the history of discovery. Again and again we find that criticisms and would-be improvements suggested by able men had been many years before thought out in all their bearings and dismissed by the great naturalist. A fascinating record of Darwin's thoughts on evolution and natural selection, both before and after the appearance of the Origin,' is preserved in the five volumes of his letters, from which we shall freely quote on the present occasion. A careful study of his great works and of these letters shows how shadowy and unsubstantial is the vast pile of criticism accumulated since 1859. The history of the last fifty years does not inspire confidence in the vitality of the improvements suggested, caught up and repeated at the present day no less eagerly than were the now forgotten improvements which have had their little day and ceased to be.

Weismann and the Transmission of Acquired
Characters.

Leaving the controversies of the present day for later consideration, let us now examine the one solid and important modification of the Darwinian conception of evolution, which was brought forward by August Weismann, and became the subject of much discussion a few years after Darwin's death. As the outcome of his researches upon the development of the germ-cells of Hydrozoa, Weismann was led to a theory of heredity based on the continuity of the germ-plasm or essential material of the germ-cell-the bearer of the hereditary qualities. This theory, unlike Darwin's wonderful theory of pangenesis, did not include a mechanism whereby the characters acquired by parents during their lifetime could be handed down and appear as inherent characters in the offspring. Weismann was thus led to enquire into and finally to reject the evidence upon which the belief in such hereditary transmission was held.

A full and detailed account of the searching investigations into the evidence for the transmission of acquired