The Progress of the Century

BY ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE; PROF. WILLIAM RAMSAY; PROF. WILLIAM MATTHEW FLINDERS-PETRIE; SIR JOSEPH NORMAN LOCKYER; EDWARD CAIRD; WILLIAM OSLER; W. W. KEEN; PROF. ELIHU THOMSON; PRESIDENT THOMAS CORWIN MENDENHALL; SIR CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE; CAPTAIN ALFRED T. MAHAN; ANDREW LANG; THOMAS C. CLARKE; CARDINAL JAMES GIBBONS; REV. ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN; PROF. RICHARD J. H. GOTTHEIL; PROF. GOLDWIN SMITH
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1901
Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1901, by The Sun Printing and Publishing Association. All rights reserved.


Among the great and fertile scientific conceptions which have either originated or become firmly established during the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution, if not the greatest of them all, will certainly take its place in the front rank. As a partial explanation (for no complete explanation is possible to finite intelligence) of the phenomena of nature, it illuminates every department of science, from the study of the most remote cosmic phenomena accessible to us to that of the minutest organisms revealed by the most powerful microscopes; while upon the great problem of the mode of origin of the various forms of life—long considered insoluble—it throws so clear a light that to many biologists it seems to afford as complete a solution, in principle, as we can expect to reach.
So many of the objections which are still made to the theory of evolution, and especially to that branch of it which deals with living organisms, rest upon a misconception of what it professes to explain, and even of what any theory can possibly explain, that a few words on its nature and limits seem to be necessary.
Evolution, as a general principle, implies that all things in the universe, as we see them, have arisen from other things which preceded them by a process of modification, under the action of those all-pervading but mysterious agencies known to us as “natural forces,” or, more generally, “the laws of nature.” More particularly the term evolution implies that the process is an “unrolling,” or “unfolding,” derived probably from the way in which leaves and flowers are usually rolled up or crumpled up in the bud and grow into their perfect form by unrolling or unfolding. Insects in the pupa and vertebrates in the embryo exhibit a somewhat similar condition of folding, and the word is therefore very applicable to an extensive range of phenomena; but it must not be taken as universally applicable, since in the material world there are other modes of orderly change under natural laws to which the terms development or evolution are equally applicable. The “continuity” of physical phenomena, as illustrated by the late Sir William Grove in 1866, has the same general meaning, but evolution implies more than mere continuity or succession—something like growth or definite change from form to form under the action of unchangeable laws.