ity was already gone. Each succeeding day showed more and more the change that had taken place in public feeling. Defeat was turned into disaster. Disaster became utter rout and confusion. When the elections were over it was found that the Conservative party were nowhere. A majority of some hundred and twenty sent the Liberals back into power. No Liberal statesmen in our time ever before saw themselves sustained by such an army of followers. There was a moment or two of hesitation-of delay. The Queen sent for Lord Hartington; she then sent for Lord Granville; but every one knew in advance who was to come into power at last. The strife lately carried on had been the old duel between two great men. Mr. Gladstone had stood up against Lord Beaconsfield for some years and fought him alone. He had dragged his party after him into many a danger. He had compelled them more than once to fight where many of them would fain have held back, and where none of them saw any chance of victory. Now, at last, the battle had been given to his hands, and it was a matter of necessity that the triumph should bring back to power the man whose energy and eloquence had inspired the struggle. The Queen sent for Mr. Gladstone, and a new chapter of English history opened, with the opening of which this work has to close.

CHAPTER LXVII.

THE LITERATURE OF THE REIGN: SECOND SURVEY.

THE later period which we have now to survey is more rich in scientific literature than that former period which we assumed to close with the Crimean war. In practical science, as we have already shown, the advance made during the reign of Queen Victoria has been greater in many ways than the advance made from the beginning of civilization to that time. Sir Robert Peel travelled from Rome to London to assume office as Prime-minister, exactly as Constantine travelled from York to Rome to become emperor. Each traveller had all that sails and horses could do for him, and no more. A few years later Peel might have reached

London from Rome in some forty-eight hours. Something of the same kind may be said for economical, political, and what is now called social science. The whole of that system of legislative reform which is founded on a recognition of the principles of humanity may be said to belong to our own times. Our penal systems have undergone a thorough reform. More than once it seemed as if the reform were going too far, and as if the tenderness to criminals were likely to prove an encouragement to crime. But, although there have been for this reason little outbursts of reaction every now and then, the growth of the principle of humanity has been steady, and the principle has taken firm and fixed root in our systems of penal legislation. Flogging in the army and navy may be said to be now wholly abolished. The senseless and barbarous system of imprisonment for debt is abandoned. There is no more transportation of convicts. Care is taken of the lives and the health of women and children in all manner of employments. Schools are managed on systems of wise gentleness. Dotheboys Hall would be an impossible picture, even for caricature, in these later years. We are perhaps at the beginning of a movement of legislation which is about to try to the very utmost that right of State interference with individual action which at one time it was the object of most of our legislators to reduce to its very narrowest proportions. It may be that this straining. of the right of the majority over the minority is destined to bring about in due course its reaction. But we do not think that “the survival of the fittest," the doctrine on which our forefathers acted more or less consciously in the education of children and the treatment of criminals, will ever again, within any time to which speculation can safely reach, be adopted as a principle of our legislation. Much of the healthier and more humane spirit prevailing in our social systems, in our criminal laws, in the management of our schools, in the care of the State for the working-classes, for women, and for children, is undoubtedly due to the spread of that sound and practical scientific teaching which began to make it known everywhere that the recognition of the laws of health will always be found in the end to be a recognition of the laws of morality.

But, though the philosophy of these later days has proved

itself thus essentially practical, it is to be observed that the great scientific controversy of the time is distinctly and purely speculative. The Darwinian theory, as it is commonly, we will not say vulgarly, called, may be described as one of the most remarkable facts in the history of its time. Dr. Charles R. Darwin, grandson of the author of "The Botanic Garden" and "Zoonomia," was born in 1809. He showed at an early age great capacity as a naturalist. He accompanied as naturalist the expedition of her Majesty's ship Beagle for the survey of South America and the circumnavigation of the globe. This expedition occupied him nearly five years, and he returned to England in 1836. He published several studies in geology and in fossil species, and seemed to have made his mark as a naturalist of distinction, and nothing more. Charles Knight's "English Cyclopædia," published in 1855, twenty years after the return of Dr. Darwin from his great voyage, speaks in high terms of his contributions to the sciences he studied, and adds: "Mr. Darwin is still in the prime of life, and may, therefore, be expected to contribute largely to the extension of the sciences he has so successfully cultivated." If Mr. Darwin had died soon after that time the world would never have suspected that it had lost anything more than a highly promising naturalist. In 1859 appeared "The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of the Favored Races in the Struggle of Life." The book had hardly been published when it was found that a great crisis had been reached in the history of science and of thought. The importance of Darwin's "Origin of Species," regarded as a mere historical fact, is of at least as much importance to the world as Comte's publication of his theory of historical development. In these pages we are considering Darwin's theory and his work merely as historical facts. We are dealing with them as we might deal with the fall of a dynasty or the birth of a new State. The controversy which broke out when the "Origin of Species" was published has been going on ever since without the slightest sign of diminishing ardor. It spread almost through all society. It was heard from the pulpit and from the platform; it raged in the scientific and unscientific magazines. It was trumpeted in the newspapers; it made one of the stock subjects of talk

in the dining-room and the smoking-room; it tittered over the tea-table. Mr. Darwin's central idea was that the various species of plants and animals, instead of being each specially created and immutable, are continually undergoing modification and change through a process of adaptation, by virtue of which such varieties of the species as are in any way better fitted for the rough work of the struggle for existence are enabled to survive and multiply at the expense of the others. Mr. Darwin considers this principle, with, indeed, some other and less important causes, capable of explaining the manner in which all existing types may have descended from one or a very few low forms of life. All animals, beasts, birds, reptiles, insects have descended, he contends, from a very limited number of progenitors, and he holds that analogy points to the belief that all animals and plants whatever have descended from one common prototype. The idea that man gradually developed from some very low prototype was, of course, not Dr. Darwin's especially, nor belonging even to Dr. Darwin's time. It was an idea that had been floating about the world almost at all times. It had become somewhat fashionable in England not long before Dr. Darwin published his "Origin of Species." It was led up to in the "Vestiges of Creation," a book that once caused much stir in scientific and religious circles. A strong-minded lady in Lord Beaconsfield's "Tancred" bewilders and saddens the young hero by gravely informing him that we once were fishes, and shall probably in the end be crows. But Darwin's book, if we take it as resting for its central point of doctrine upon that principle of the survival of the fittest, was the first great systematized attempt to give the theory a solid place among the scientific opinions of the world. It was worked out with the most minute and elaborate care, and with an inexhaustible patience -qualities which we do not expect to find in the originators of new and startling theories. Dr. Darwin's work was fiercely assailed and passionately championed. It was not the scientific principle which inflamed so much commotion; it was the supposed bearing of the doctrines on revealed religion. Injustice was done to the calm examination of Darwin's theory on both sides of the controversy. Many who really had not yet given themselves time even to con

sider its arguments cried out in admiration of the book, merely because they assumed that it was destined to deal a blow to the faith in revealed religion. On the other side, many of the believers in revealed religion were much too easily alarmed and too sensitive. Many of them did not pause to ask themselves whether, if every article of the doctrine were proved to be scientifically true, it would affect in the slightest degree the basis of their religious faith. To this writer it seems clear that Dr. Darwin's theory might be accepted by the most orthodox believer without the firmness of his faith moulting a feather. The theory is one altogether as to the process of growth and construction in the universe, and, whether accurate or inaccurate, does not seem in any wise to touch the question which is concerned with the sources of all life, movement, and being. However that may be, it is certain that the book made an era not only in science, but in scientific controversy, and not merely in scientific controversy, but in controversy expanding into all circles and among all intelligences. The scholar and the fribble, the divine and the school-girl, still talk and argue and wrangle over Darwin and the origin of species.

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Professor Huxley is one of the most distinguished and thorough-going supporters of Dr. Darwin's principle. Professor Huxley advocates, in his own words, "the hypothesis which supposes that species living at any time must be the result of a gradual modification of pre-existing species." He maintains that to suppose each species of plant or animal to have been formed and placed on the globe at long intervals by a distinct act of creative power, is an assumption as unsupported by tradition or revelation as it is opposed to the general analogy of nature." Professor Huxley would have been a distinguished scientific man if he had never taken any part in the Darwin controversy. He would have been a distinguished scientific man even if he had not been, as he is, a great thinker and writer. In the arena of public controversy he has long been a familiar and formidable figure. He came into the field at first almost unknown, like the Disinherited Knight in Scott's romance; and while the good-natured spectators were urging him to turn the blunt end of the lance against the shield of the least formidable opponent, he dashed, with splendid recklessness and