On Wednesday, the 1st of July 1908, half a century had passed since Darwin’s Theory of the Origin of Species was made known to the world. Fifty years have now been completed since that immortal book, The Origin of Species, was published, and a hundred years since Charles Darwin was born.

It is not every one who is in a position to understand how great and momentous was the occasion when Sir Charles Lyell and Dr. Joseph Hooker communicated to the Linnean Society of London, on the 1st of July 1858, two papers, one by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel Wallace, under the common title, “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties: and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural means of Selection.” The reason for this conjoint communication to the Linnean Society was that Darwin, who had been working for years at the subject, and had already, in 1842, drawn up a statement of his theory, not for publication, but for the consideration and criticism of his friend Hooker—unexpectedly received from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was, and had been for some years, away in the Malay Archipelago—a manuscript of an essay on the origin of species, containing views identical with his own, and even phrases similar to those he had himself found it necessary to invent. Thus Wallace speaks of the “struggle for existence,” whilst Darwin had used the term “struggle for life.” Darwin had been urged by his friends before this to publish an abstract or statement of his conclusions, but now that he had received Wallace’s manuscript, he declared in a letter to Hooker, “I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.” And so Lyell and Hooker took the matter in hand, and communicated to the Linnean Society, accompanied by an explanatory statement, the two independent papers, setting forth, as they say, “the results of the investigations of the indefatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace.” Such loyalty and regard to each other as Darwin and Wallace showed then and ever after form a delightful feature in the history of this great discovery. A wonderful thing is that Hooker, now Sir Joseph Hooker, the greatest botanist of the past century, the constant friend and comrade of Darwin, is still alive, and that Alfred Russel Wallace, too, is still with us. They both were present when the Linnean Society celebrated the meeting of fifty years ago.

The views of Darwin and Wallace have now become the established doctrine of science. They have led to the universal recognition of “the origin of species by descent with modification.” That is a statement, in other words, to the effect that all the various kinds of living things have been gradually produced by natural birth from predecessors which differ from them only slightly in the later stages of time, but become simpler and less like their descendants as we go further back, until we reach the simplest living things. It has led to the conviction that there has been no exceptional or “miraculous” suspension of the order of Nature in this process, but that all has come about in due and regular course, in virtue of the properties of natural things, which we know as the laws of physics and chemistry. Most important and dominating of all these results is the inevitable one that man himself has come from animal ancestors, in the same way, and—(this is the greatest and most far-reaching conclusion of all)—that he is still subject to those natural processes of change and development by which he has reached his present phase; that he must completely understand them and control them (so far as such control is possible) in order to maintain a healthy, happy, and improving race of men on the face of the globe. This great possession—the earth and all that lives on it—is, as Lord Bacon phrased it three hundred years ago—the Kingdom of Man. Man has but to use his intelligence in order to take control of it. The knowledge of his own relation to it, and of the ways in which the human race is affected for good and for ill, through the operation of the self-same processes which affect the breeding, the improvement, the health, the disease, the destruction, and the perfecting of other living things, has once and for all been placed within man’s reach by the discoveries of Darwin and Wallace.

Before Darwin—that is, before 1st July 1858—the origin of the different species of animals and plants was called by great thinkers like Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, “the mystery of mysteries.” The word “species” was defined as “an animal or plant which in a state of nature is distinguished by certain peculiarities of form, size, colour, or other circumstance from any other animal or plant, and propagates after its kind individuals perfectly resembling the parent, its peculiarities being therefore permanent.” So wrote a great naturalist in the days before Darwin. This definition may be illustrated by two common English birds—the rook and the crow. They differ from each other in slight peculiarities of form, structure, and habits, and, moreover, rooks always produce rooks, and crows always produce crows, and they do not interbreed. Therefore it was held that all the rooks in the world had descended from a single pair of rooks, and all the crows in like manner from a single pair of crows, while it was considered impossible that crows could have descended from rooks, or rooks from crows. The “origin” of the first pair of each kind was a mystery, and by many persons was held to have been due to a miraculous and sudden act of “creation.” But besides our crow and rook, there are about thirty other birds in various parts of the world so much like our crow and rook that they are commonly called crows, and are all regarded as “species” of the genus crow (or Corvus). It was held before Darwin that all the individuals of each of these “species” were descended from an ancestral pair of crows of that species. There would have been thirty different original kinds, the “origin” of which was unknown, and by naturalists was regarded as a mystery. Now, on the contrary, it is held that all the thirty living species are descended from one, not from thirty, ancestral species, and have been gradually modified to their present character in different parts of the world; and, further, that this ancestral species was itself derived by slow process of change and natural birth from preceding crow-like birds no longer existing.

As Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has said in his most readable and delightful book, Darwinism—where he gives all the credit and glory to his great fellow-worker: “Darwin wrote for a generation which had not accepted evolution—a generation which poured contempt on those who upheld the derivation of species from species by any natural law of descent. He did his work so well that ‘descent with modification’ is now universally accepted as the order of nature in the organic world, and the rising generation of naturalists can hardly realise the novelty of this idea, or that their fathers considered it a scientific heresy to be condemned rather than seriously discussed.”

For those who are not naturalists or men of science it is an object-lesson of the highest importance, that the speculations and observations which have led to the general acceptance of a new view as to the origin of the species of birds, butterflies, and flowers—in itself apparently a matter of no consequence to human life and progress—should have necessarily led to a new epoch in philosophy, and in the higher state-craft; in fact, to the establishment of the scientific knowledge of life as the one sure guide and determining factor of civilisation. How to breed a healthy, capable race of men, how to preserve such a race, how to educate and to train it, so that its best qualities of mind and body may be brought to activity and perfection—this is what Darwinism can teach us, and will teach us when the great subjects of inheritance and of variation are more fully investigated by the aid of public funds, and when the human mind has been as carefully examined and its laws as well ascertained, as are those of the human body. There is no reason for delay; no excuse for it. For two thousand years the learned men of Europe debated as to whether this or that place was the site of ancient Troy, or whether there ever was such a place at all. At last (only twenty-five years ago) a retired man of business, named Schliemann, had a “happy thought”—it was not the thought of a learned pedant, but of a scientific investigator. He said, “Let us go and see.” And at the expense of a few thousand pounds he went and found Troy and MycenÆ, and revealed—“dis-covered”—the whole matter. That was the most tremendous and picturesque triumph of the scientific method over mere talk and pretended historical learning which has ever been seen since human record has existed. It ought to be told to every boy and girl, for it is the greatest and most obvious proof of the overwhelming power of the investigation of tangible things and the futility of chatter, which has ever been seen. It is enough to inspire hope and belief in experiment even in the breast of a Member of Parliament, or of a Minister of the Crown.