Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART IV. MODERN EVOLUTION. 1. Darwin and Wallace. We have to deal with Man as a product of Evolution; with Society as a product of Evolution; and with Moral Phenomena as products of Evolution. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 193. Charles Robert Darwin (the second name was rarely used by him) was born at Shrewsbury on the 12th of February, 1809. He came of a long line of Lincolnshire yeomen, whose forbears spelt the name variously, as Darwen, Derwent, and Darwynne, perhaps deriving it from the river of kindred name. His father was a kindly, prosperous doctor, of sufficient scientific reputation to secure his election into the Royal Society, although that coveted honour was then more easily obtained than now. Of the more famous grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the reminder suffices that both his prose and poetry were vehicles of suggestive speculations on the development of life-forms. Dealing with bald facts and dates for clearance of what follows, it may be added that Charles Darwin was educated at the Grammar School of his native town; that he passed thence to Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities; was occupied as volunteer naturalist on board the Beagle from December, 1831, till October, 1836; that he published his epoch-making Origin of Species in November, 1859; and that he was buried by the-side of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey on the 26th of April, 1882. As with not a few other men of " light and leading," neither school nor university did much for him, nor did his boyhood give indication of future greatness. In his answers to the series of questions addressed to various scientific men in 1873 by his distinguished cousin, Francis Galton, he says: " I con- sider that all I have learnt of any value has been self-taught," and he adds that his educat...
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