gly variable.

To explain to child-minds that a Supreme Being made things outright just
as they are, is easy; but to study and in degree know how things
evolved, requires infinite patience and great labor. It also means small
sympathy from the indifferent whom the earth has spawned in swarms, and
the hatred of the volunteers who ride in coaches, and tell the many what
they wish to hear.

The volunteers drove Aristotle into exile, and from his time they had
their way for two thousand years, when John Ray, Linnaeus and Buffon
appeared.

In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-five, Immanuel Kant, the little man who
stayed near home and watched the stars tumble into his net, put forth
his theory that every animal organism in the world was developed from a
common original germ.

In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of
Charles Darwin, inspired by Kant and Goethe, put forth his book,
"Zoonomia," wherein he maintained the gradual growth and evolution of
all organisms from minute, unseen germs. These views were put forth more
as a poetic hypothesis than as a well-grounded scientific fact, so
little attention was paid to Erasmus Darwin's books. The fanciful
accounts of Creation put forth by Moses three thousand years before were
firmly maintained by the entrenched volunteers and their millions of
devotees and followers.

But Kant, Goethe, Karl von Baer and August de Sainte-Hilaire were now
planting their outposts throughout the civilized world, honeycombing
Christendom with doubt.

In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, Herbert Spencer had argued in
public and in pamphlets that species have undergone changes and
modifications through change of surroundings, and that the account of
Noah and his ark, with pairs of everything that flew, crept or ran, was
fanciful and absurd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from
fiction.

Early in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight, Charles Darwin received
from his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, a paper entitled, "On the
Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type." At
this time Darwin had in the hands of the secretary of the Linnaeus
Society a paper entitled, "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties,
or the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties by Means of Natural
Selection."

The similarity in title, as well as the similarity in treatment of the
Wallace theme, startled Darwin. He had been working on the idea for
twenty years, and