the championship of a few leaders of
science was all-essential. He felt that if he could make converts of
Hooker and Lyell and of Thomas Henry Huxley at once, all would be well.

His success in this regard, as in others, exceeded his expectations.
Hooker was an ardent disciple from reading the proof-sheets before the
book was published; Lyell renounced his former beliefs and fell into
line a few months later; while Huxley, so soon as he had mastered
the central idea of natural selection, marvelled that so simple yet
all-potent a thought had escaped him so long, and then rushed eagerly
into the fray, wielding the keenest dialectic blade that was drawn
during the entire controversy. Then, too, unexpected recruits were found
in Sir John Lubbock and John Tyndall, who carried the war eagerly into
their respective territories; while Herbert Spencer, who had advocated
a doctrine of transmutation on philosophic grounds some years before
Darwin published the key to the mystery--and who himself had barely
escaped independent discovery of that key--lent his masterful influence
to the cause. In America the famous botanist Asa Gray, who had long been
a correspondent of Darwin's but whose advocacy of the new theory had not
been anticipated, became an ardent propagandist; while in Germany Ernst
Heinrich Haeckel, the youthful but already noted zoologist, took up the
fight with equal enthusiasm.

Against these few doughty champions--with here and there another of less
general renown--was arrayed, at the outset, practically all Christendom.
The interest of the question came home to every person of intelligence,
whatever his calling, and the more deeply as it became more and more
clear how far-reaching are the real bearings of the doctrine of natural
selection. Soon it was seen that should the doctrine of the survival
of the favored races through the struggle for existence win, there must
come with it as radical a change in man's estimate of his own position
as had come in the day when, through the efforts of Copernicus and
Galileo, the world was dethroned from its supposed central position in
the universe. The whole conservative majority of mankind recoiled from
this necessity with horror. And this conservative majority included not
laymen merely, but a vast preponderance of the leaders of science also.

With the open-minded minority, on the other hand, the theory of
natural selection made its way by leaps and bounds. Its delightful
si