de by
side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court
memoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them not; the word
evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and refined
dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised only the 'Darwinian theory,'
'natural selection,' 'the missing link,' and the belief that men were
merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon
them. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented and
patented the entire business, including descent with modification, if
such notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large's speculative
intelligence.

Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and older
antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room view would lead us
to imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory indeed, and it
has an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it
back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague and
indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman
poet--the only original poet in the Latin language--did indeed hit out
for himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and
shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it
was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of
the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the
development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all,
but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's camel, out of its author's
own pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt have
built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little
straw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-making
being still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowy
Aladdin's palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary
world of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos into
an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is not thus that systems
arise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for
all time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound
bricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.

It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to
take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,
Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders