nature there _is_ at work a
modifying influence of the same sort as that which they believed to
have caused the differences of species--'an influence which, to all
appearance, would produce in the millions of years and under the great
variety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of
change.' What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-room
philosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written seven
years before Darwin published the 'Origin of Species.'

The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians before
Darwin. Here are a few of them--Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates,
Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer.
Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. As
well say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Lionardo made the
Italian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as
say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionary
movement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousand
predecessors worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped to
diffuse and to confirm his various principles.

Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the special
notion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that while
plants and animals vary perpetually and vary indefinitely, all the
varieties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances of
the species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, because
every point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the struggle
for life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, because
every point of advantage similarly tells in the individual's favour in
that ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to the
evolutionary concept, fortified by Darwin's powerful advocacy of the
general principle of descent with modification, that won over the whole
world to the 'Darwinian theory.' Before Darwin, many men of science
were evolutionists: after Darwin, all men of science became so at once,
and the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow their
leadership.

As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this--that
plants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitive
living creature, which itself was the product of light and heat acting
on the special chemical constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting from
that single early