y: "To the end of time, if
the question be asked, 'Who taught people to believe in Evolution?' the
answer must be that it was Mr. Darwin. This is true, and it is hard to
see what palm of higher praise can be awarded to any philosopher.") The
moment of inspiration did not come with the reading of Malthus, but with
the opening of the "first note-book on Transmutation of Species." ("Life
and Letters", I. pages 276 and 83.) Evolution is a process of Variation
and Heredity. The older writers, though they had some vague idea that
it must be so, did not study Variation and Heredity. Darwin did, and so
begat not a theory, but a science.

The extent to which this is true, the scientific world is only beginning
to realise. So little was the fact appreciated in Darwin's own time that
the success of his writings was followed by an almost total cessation of
work in that special field. Of the causes which led to this remarkable
consequence I have spoken elsewhere. They proceeded from circumstances
peculiar to the time; but whatever the causes there is no doubt that
this statement of the result is historically exact, and those who
make it their business to collect facts elucidating the physiology of
Heredity and Variation are well aware that they will find little to
reward their quest in the leading scientific Journals of the Darwinian
epoch.

In those thirty years the original stock of evidence current and in
circulation even underwent a process of attrition. As in the story of
the Eastern sage who first wrote the collected learning of the universe
for his sons in a thousand volumes, and by successive compression and
burning reduced them to one, and from this by further burning distilled
the single ejaculation of the Faith, "There is no god but God and
Mohamed is the Prophet of God," which was all his maturer wisdom deemed
essential:--so in the books of that period do we find the corpus of
genetic knowledge dwindle to a few prerogative instances, and these at
last to the brief formula of an unquestioned creed.

And yet in all else that concerns biological science this period was,
in very truth, our Golden Age, when the natural history of the earth was
explored as never before; morphology and embryology were exhaustively
ransacked; the physiology of plants and animals began to rival chemistry
and physics in precision of method and in the rapidity of its advances;
and the foundations of pathology were laid.

In contrast with this i