ature to suppose that,
just as all else in this far-spread science was formed on the laws
impressed upon it at first by its Author, so also was this. An exception
presented to us in such a light appears admissible only when we succeed
in forbidding our minds to follow out those reasoning processes to
which, by another law of the Almighty, they tend, and for which they are
adapted."(4)

Such reasoning as this naturally aroused bitter animadversions, and
cannot have been without effect in creating an undercurrent of thought
in opposition to the main trend of opinion of the time. But the book can
hardly be said to have done more than that. Indeed, some critics
have denied it even this merit. After its publication, as before,
the conception of transmutation of species remained in the popular
estimation, both lay and scientific, an almost forgotten "heresy."

It is true that here and there a scientist of greater or less repute--as
Von Buch, Meckel, and Von Baer in Germany, Bory Saint-Vincent in
France, Wells, Grant, and Matthew in England, and Leidy in America--had
expressed more or less tentative dissent from the doctrine of
special creation and immutability of species, but their unaggressive
suggestions, usually put forward in obscure publications, and
incidentally, were utterly overlooked and ignored. And so, despite the
scientific advances along many lines at the middle of the century, the
idea of the transmutability of organic races had no such prominence,
either in scientific or unscientific circles, as it had acquired fifty
years before. Special creation held the day, seemingly unopposed.

DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

But even at this time the fancied security of the special-creation
hypothesis was by no means real. Though it seemed so invincible, its
real position was that of an apparently impregnable fortress beneath
which, all unbeknown to the garrison, a powder-mine has been dug and
lies ready for explosion. For already there existed in the secluded
work-room of an English naturalist, a manuscript volume and a portfolio
of notes which might have sufficed, if given publicity, to shatter the
entire structure of the special-creation hypothesis. The naturalist who,
by dint of long and patient effort, had constructed this powder-mine of
facts was Charles Robert Darwin, grandson of the author of Zoonomia.

As long ago as July 1, 1837, young Darwin, then twenty-eight years of
age, had opened a private journ