orks begets such an affection for the man, for
the elements of character displayed on every page, that one is slow in
convincing one's self that anything is wrong with his theories. There
is danger that one's critical judgment will be blinded by one's
partiality for the man.

For the band of brilliant men who surrounded him and championed his
doctrines--Spencer, Huxley, Lyall, Hooker, and others--one feels
nothing more personal than admiration; unless the eloquent and
chivalrous Huxley--the knight in shining armor of the Darwinian
theory--inspires a warmer feeling. Darwin himself almost disarms one
by his amazing candor and his utter self-abnegation. The question
always paramount in his mind is, what is the truth about this matter?
What fact have you got for me, he seems to say, that will upset my
conclusion? If you have one, that is just what I am looking for.

Could we have been permitted to gaze upon the earth in the middle
geologic period, in Jurassic or Triassic times, we should have seen it
teeming with huge, uncouth, gigantic forms of animal life, in the sea,
on the land, and in the air, and with many lesser forms, but with no
sign of man anywhere; ransack the earth from pole to pole and there
was no sign or suggestion, so far as we could have seen, of a human
being.

Come down the stream of time several millions of years--to our own
geologic age--and we find the earth swarming with the human species
like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found
in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the
earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they
come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that a hand reached down
from heaven, or up from below, and placed them there. There is no
alternative but to believe that in some way they arose out of the
antecedent animal life of the globe; in other words that man is the
result of the process of evolution, and that all other existing forms
of life, vegetable and animal, are a product of the same movement.

To explain how this came about, what factors and forces entered into
the transformation, is the task that Darwin set himself. It was a
mighty task, and whether or not his solution of the problem stands the
test of time, we must yet bow in reverence before one of the greatest
of natural philosophers; for even to have conceived this problem thus
clearly, and to have placed it in intelligible form before men's
minds