mplicity--which at first sight made it seem neither new nor
important--coupled with the marvellous comprehensiveness of its
implications, gave it a hold on the imagination, and secured it a
hearing where other theories of transmutation of species had been
utterly scorned. Men who had found Lamarck's conception of change
through voluntary effort ridiculous, and the vaporings of the Vestiges
altogether despicable, men whose scientific cautions held them back
from Spencer's deductive argument, took eager hold of that tangible,
ever-present principle of natural selection, and were led on and on to
its goal. Hour by hour the attitude of the thinking world towards this
new principle changed; never before was so great a revolution wrought so
suddenly.

Nor was this merely because "the times were ripe" or "men's minds
prepared for evolution." Darwin himself bears witness that this was not
altogether so. All through the years in which he brooded this theory he
sounded his scientific friends, and could find among them not one
who acknowledged a doctrine of transmutation. The reaction from the
stand-point of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin and Goethe had been complete,
and when Charles Darwin avowed his own conviction he expected always
to have it met with ridicule or contempt. In 1857 there was but one
man speaking with any large degree of authority in the world who openly
avowed a belief in transmutation of species--that man being Herbert
Spencer. But the Origin of Species came, as Huxley has said, like a
flash in the darkness, enabling the benighted voyager to see the way.
The score of years during which its author had waited and worked
had been years well spent. Darwin had become, as he himself says, a
veritable Croesus, "overwhelmed with his riches in facts"--facts of
zoology, of selective artificial breeding, of geographical distribution
of animals, of embryology, of paleontology. He had massed his facts
about his theory, condensed them and recondensed, until his volume of
five hundred pages was an encyclopaedia in scope. During those long
years of musing he had thought out almost every conceivable objection to
his theory, and in his book every such objection was stated with fullest
force and candor, together with such reply as the facts at command
might dictate. It was the force of those twenty years of effort of
a master-mind that made the sudden breach in the breaswtork{sic} of
current thought.

Once this breach was effected