UNLIKE his disciples Spencer and Huxley, Darwin shunned the “Reviews.” He wrote “works” and “treatises,”—nothing which can be called an essay in the popular sense, though such works as “The Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man” are constructed on a plan which often results incidentally in completely elaborated essays of great merit. Darwin is voluminous, but not diffuse. He deals with facts by massing as illustrations of his hypotheses everything which can be brought to bear from his own extensive observation and his still more extensive reading. It is said that he had a habit of buying books and tearing from them, to be filed for reference, everything in them which bore on his own work. He handles his facts with great literary skill, but the nature of the subjects he treated called for amplification rather than for the condensation which the highest class of the essay demands. In his summary of the theory of Natural Selection and in his restatement of his views of the Survival of the Fittest, he illustrates his habit of thinking coherently and compactly and shows at the same time the essentially poetical quality of his imagination. “As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds,” he writes, “and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”

  Though perhaps he never attempted verse in his life, Darwin is indeed much more a poet than his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, author of “The Loves of the Plants,”—from whom and Lord Monboddo he inherited his theory of “The Descent of Man.” “Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament?”—asks the elder Darwin—“from one living filament which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations?” This is in itself doubtlessly a much higher achievement of constructive imagination than anything the elder Darwin ever put into his verse, but in tracing the earthworm through the clay as he prepares the barren earth for man; in following the insect from flower to flower, to find how the beauty and fragrance of the flower harmonize the instincts of insect life with a great plan of perpetual improvement operating throughout all nature, the younger Darwin showed the same mind which was in Milton and Shakespeare. Though himself an agnostic, he insisted that his theories were compatible with orthodox Christianity, and his celebrated pupil, the learned and saintly Drummond, has demonstrated it to the satisfaction of many who at first believed it impossible. But however much the science of some may conflict with the theology of others, the theory that all the laws of nature work to force progress resulted under Darwin’s researches in developing such new ideas of beauty and harmony that there was an irresistible impulse to accept it as true. It was the highest poetical idea ever attained by biological science, and it has already worked itself out in revolutionary improvements of flowers and fruits by methods which Darwin first suggested.

  This is the positive part of Darwin’s great work. The negative part remains still to be fought over in the twentieth century—as it must necessarily be with bitterness. The Malthusian theory that among men the strong must crush the weak in order to survive has been discredited in political economy, but as Darwin introduced it into science as the basis of his theory of struggle and survival, it comes back into politics from an unexpected quarter, and it has already resulted in bold denial that there can exist as a reality what Beccaria and Burlamaqui asserted as natural, inherent, and inalienable rights.

  Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, England, February 12th, 1809. Educated at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, he made up his mind early in life to devote himself to science. In pursuance of his plan, he retired in 1842 to a secluded part of Kent where he carried on the investigation which resulted in his first epoch-marking work, “The Origin of Species,” published in 1859. “The Descent of Man,” which appeared in 1871, provoked the most heated controversy of the nineteenth century. But Darwin took no part in it. While it was raging, he devoted his time to the study of the minutiæ of nature. His work on Earthworms has been greatly admired by some because of the faculty of close observation it shows. This faculty, illustrated in his researches into the cross-fertilization of plants by means of insects, has proved more immediately valuable than his great powers of generalization. The modern rose-garden and the modern orchard are products of this kind of “Darwinism.” These noble results of his ideas remain as his best memorial.