pose to
deal in the following pages.

It has been my own rare good fortune to have enjoyed the friendship of
all the great leaders in this important movement--of Huxley, Hooker,
Scrope, Wallace, Lyell and Darwin--and, with some of them, I was long on
terms of affectionate intimacy. From their own lips I have learned of
incidents, and listened to anecdotes, bearing on the events of a
memorable past. Would that I could hope to bring before my readers, in
all their nobility, a vivid picture of the characteristics of the men to
whom science and the world owe so much!

For it is not only by their intellectual greatness that we are
impressed. Every man of science is proud, and justly proud, of the
grandeur of character, the unexampled generosity, the modesty and
simplicity which distinguished these pioneers in a great cause. It is
unfortunately true, that the votaries of science--like the cultivators
of art and literature--have sometimes so far forgotten their high
vocation, as to have been more careful about the priority of their
personal claims than of the purity of their own motives--they have
sometimes, it must be sadly admitted, allowed self-interest to obscure
the interests of science. But in the story we have to relate there are
no 'regrettable incidents' to be deplored; never has there occurred any
event that marred the harmony in this band of fellow-workers, striving
towards a great ideal. So noble, indeed, was the great central
figure--Charles Darwin--that his senior Lyell and all his juniors were
bound to him by the strongest ties of admiration, respect and affection;
while he, in his graceful modesty, thought more of them than of himself,
of the results of their labours rather than of his own great
achievement.

It is not, as sometimes suggested, the striking out of new ideas which
is of the greatest importance in the history of science, but rather the
accumulation of observations and experiments, the reasonings based upon
these, and the writings in which facts and reasonings are presented to
the world--by which a merely suggestive hypothesis becomes a vivifying
theory--that really count in making history.

Talking with Matthew Arnold in 1871, he laughingly remarked to me 'I
cannot understand why you scientific people make such a fuss about
Darwin. Why it's all in Lucretius!' On my replying, 'Yes! Lucretius
guessed what Darwin proved,' he mischievously rejoined 'Ah! that only
shows how much greater Lucretius