CHARLES DARWIN
By
GRANT ALLEN
ENGLISH WORTHIES
EDITED BY ANDREW LANG
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1885
PREFACE
In this little volume I have endeavoured to present the life and work ofCharles Darwin viewed as a moment in a great revolution, in due relationboth to those who went before and to those who come after him.Recognising, as has been well said, that the wave makes the crest, notthe crest the wave, I have tried to let my hero fall naturally into hisproper place in a vast onward movement of the human intellect, of whichhe was himself at once a splendid product and a moving cause of thefirst importance. I have attempted to show him both as receiving thetorch from Lamarck and Malthus, and as passing it on with renewedbrilliancy to the wide school of evolutionary thinkers whom his work wasinstrumental in arousing to fresh and vigorous activity along a thousandseparate and varied lines of thought and action.
As Mr. Francis Darwin was already engaged upon a life of his father, Ishould have shrunk from putting[Pg iv] forth my own little book if I had notsucceeded in securing beforehand his kind sanction. That sanction,however, was at once so frankly and cordially given, that all myhesitation upon such a score was immediately laid aside; and as I havenecessarily had to deal rather with Darwin's position as a thinker andworker than with the biographical details of his private life, I trustthe lesser book may not clash with the greater, but to some extent maysupplement and even illustrate it.
Treating my subject mainly as a study in the interaction of organism andenvironment, it has been necessary for me frequently to introduce thenames of living men of science side by side with some of those who havemore or less recently passed away from among us. For uniformity's sake,as well as for brevity's, I have been compelled, in every instancealike, to omit the customary conventional handles. I trust those whothus find themselves docked of their usual titles of respect will kindlyremember that the practice is in fact adopted honoris causâ; they arepaying prematurely the usual penalty of intellectual greatness.
My obligations to Professor Huxley, to Professor Fiske, to Mr. HerbertSpencer, to Professor Sachs, to Hermann Müller, to Dr. Krause, toCharles Darwin himself, and to many other historians and critics ofevolutionism, will be sufficiently obvious to all instructed[Pg v] readers,and are for the most part fully acknowledged already in the text. Itwould be absurd to overload so small and popularly written a book withreferences and authorities. I hope, therefore, that any other writers towhom I may inadvertently have neglected to confess my debts will kindlyrest satisfied with this general acknowledgment. There are, however,three persons in particular from whom I have so largely borrowed factsor ideas that I owe them more special and definite thanks. From Mr.Woodall's admirable paper on Charles Darwin, contributed to the'Transactions of the Shropshire Archæological Society,' I have takenmuch interesting information about my hero's immediate ancestry andearly days. From Mr. Samuel Butler, the author of 'Evolution Old andNew,' I have derived many pregnant suggestions with regard to the trueposition and meaning of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and the earlyessentially teleological evolutionists—suggestions which I am all themore anxious to acknowledge since I differ fundamentally from Mr. Butlerin his estimate of the worth of Cha