Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On the genesis of the species / by St. George Mivart. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![I.] the Darwinian theory, so novel and so startling, has found a cloud of advocates and opponents beyond and outside the world of physical science. In the first place, it was inevitable that a great crowd of half-educated men and shallow thinkers should accept with eager- ness the theory of JSTatural Selection, or rather what they think to be such (for few things are more remarkable than the way in which it has been misunderstood), on account of a certain characteristic it has in common with other theories; which should not be mentioned in the same breath with it, except, as now? with the accompaniment of protest and apology. We refer to its remarkable simplicity, and the ready way in which phenomena the most complex appear explicable by a cause for the compre- hension of which laborious and persevering efforts are not required, but which may be represented by the simjjle phrase survival of the fittest. With nothing more than this, can, on the Darwinian theory, all the most intricate facts of distribution and affinity, form, and colour, be accounted for; as well the most complex instincts and the most admirable adjustments, such as those of the human eye and ear. It is in great measure then, owing to this supposed simplicity, and to a belief in its being yet easier and more simple than it is, that Darwinism, however imperfectly understood, has become a subject for general conversation, and has been able thus widely to increase a certain knowledge of biological matters; and this excitation of interest in quarters where otherwise it would have been en- tirely wanting, is an additional motive for gratitude on the part of naturalists to the authors of the new theory. At the same time it must be admitted that a similar simplicity —the apparently easy explanation of complex phenomena— also constitutes the charm of such matters as hydropathy and plirenology, in the eyes of the unlearned or half-educated public. It is indeed the charm of all those seeming short cuts to knowledge, by which the labour of mastering scientific details is](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21954471_0031.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
