ng men to
cultivate letters by mere contrast. Yet the ancestral literary tendency
had only fallen dormant in him then; and earlier it had been active. It
can indeed hardly be said that either his contribution to the _Voyage of
the Beagle_, or _The Origin of Species_, or _The Descent of Man_, or any
of the others, is absolutely remarkable for style in the ordinary sense
of that phrase. The style of Darwin attempts no ornateness, and on the
other hand it is not of those extremely simple styles which are
independent of ornament and to which ornament would be simply a
defacement. But it is very clear; it is not in the least slovenly; and
there is about it the indefinable sense that the writer might have been
a much greater writer, simply as such, than he is, if he had cared to
take the trouble, and had not been almost solely intent upon his matter.
Such writers are not so common that they should be neglected, and they
may at least stand in the Court of the Gentiles, the "provincial band"
of literature.

A very remarkable book which was in a way Darwinism before Darwin, which
attracted much attention and violent opposition in 1844, the year of its
publication, and which for a long time remained unowned, was the
_Vestiges of Creation_, subsequently known to be the work of Robert
Chambers, the younger of two brothers who did great things in the
popular publishing trade at Edinburgh, and who founded a house which has
always been foremost in the diffusion of sound and cheap literature,
information, and amusement. Robert was born at Peebles in 1802 and died
at St. Andrews in 1871, having been, besides his publishing labours, a
voluminous author and compiler. Nothing he did was quite equal to the
_Vestiges_, a book rather literary than scientific, and treating the
still crude evolution theory rather from the point of view of popular
philosophy than from that of strict biological investigation; but
curiously stimulating and enthusiastic, with a touch of poetry in it not
often to be found in such books, and attractive as showing the way in
which doctrines which are about to take a strong hold of the general
mind not infrequently communicate themselves, in an unfinished but
inspiring form, to persons who, except general literary culture and
interest, do not seem to offer any specially favourable soil for their
germination. Purely scientific men have usually rather pooh-poohed the
_Vestiges_, but there is the Platonic quality in it.