In the midst of all this amount of work, remarkable alike for its variety and its importance, among plants, the animal kingdom was by no means neglected. A large moiety of "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication" (1868), which contains the pièces justificatives of the first chapter of the "Origin," is devoted to domestic animals, and the hypothesis of "pangenesis" propounded in the second volume applies to the whole living world. In the "Origin" Darwin throws out some suggestions as to the causes of variation, but he takes heredity, as it is manifested by individual organisms, for granted, as an ultimate fact; pangenesis is an attempt to account for the phenomena of heredity in the organism, on the assumption that the physiological units of which the organism is composed give off gemmules, which, in virtue of heredity, tend to reproduce the unit from which they are derived.
That Darwin had the application of his theory to the origin of the human species clearly in his mind in 1859, is obvious from a passage in the first edition of "The Origin of Species." (Ed. I, p. 488.) "In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." It is one of the curiosities of scientific literature, that, in the face of this plain declaration, its author should have been charged with concealing his opinions on the subject of the origin of man. But he reserved the full statement of his views until 1871, when the "Descent of Man" was published. The "Expression of the Emotions" (originally intended to form only a chapter in the "Descent of Man") grew into a separate volume, which appeared in 1872. Although always taking a keen interest in geology, Darwin naturally found no time disposable for geological work, even had his health permitted it, after he became seriously engaged with the great problem of species. But the last of his labours is, in some sense, a return to his earliest, inasmuch as it is an expansion of a short paper read before the Geological Society more than forty years before, and, as he says, "revived old geological thoughts" (I, p. 98). In fact, "The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms," affords as striking an example of the great results produced by the long-continued operation of small causes as even the author of the "Principles of Geology" could have desired.
In the early months of 1882 Darwin's health underwent a change for the worse; attacks of giddiness and fainting supervened, and on the 19th of April he died. On the 24th, his remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, in accordance with the general feeling that such a man as he should not go to the grave without some public recognition of the greatness of his work.
Mr. Darwin became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1839; one of the Royal Medals was awarded to him in 1853, and he received the Copley Medal in 1864. The "Life and Letters," edited with admirable skill and judgment by Mr. Francis Darwin, gives a full and singularly vivid presentment of his father's personal character, of his mode of work, and of the events of his life. In the present brief obituary notice, the writer has attempted nothing more than to select and put together those facts which enable us to trace the intellectual evolution of one of the greatest of the many great men of science whose names adorn the long roll of the Fellows of the Royal Society.
XI On Our Knowledge Of The Causes Of The Phenomena Of Organic Nature
[Six Lectures to Working Men.--1863.]
I. The Present Condition Of Organic Nature
When it was my duty to consider what subject I would select for the six lectures which I shall now have the pleasure of delivering to you, it occurred to me that I could not do better than endeavour to put before you in a true light, or in what I might perhaps with more modesty call, that which I conceive myself to be the true light, the position of a book which has been more praised and more abused, perhaps, than any book which has appeared for some years;--I mean Mr. Darwin's work on the "Origin of Species." That work, I doubt not, many of you have read; for I know the inquiring spirit which is rife among you. At any rate, all of you will have heard of it,--some by one kind of report and some by another kind of report; the attention of all and the curiosity of all have been probably more or less excited on the subject of that work. All I can do, and all I shall attempt to do, is to put before you that kind of judgment which has been formed by a man, who, of course, is liable to judge erroneously; but, at any rate, of one whose business and profession it is to form judgments upon questions of this nature.
And here, as it will always happen when dealing with an extensive subject, the greater part of my course--if, indeed, so small a number of lectures can be properly called a course--must be devoted to preliminary matters, or rather to a statement of those facts and of those principles which the work itself dwells upon, and brings more or less directly before us. I have no right to suppose that all or any of you are naturalists; and, even if you were, the misconceptions and misunderstandings prevalent even among naturalists, on these matters, would make it desirable that I should take the course I now propose to take,--that I should start from the beginning,--that I should endeavour to point out what is the existing state of the organic world--that I should point out its past condition,--that I should state what is the precise nature of the undertaking which Mr. Darwin has taken in hand; that I should endeavour to show you what are the only methods by which that undertaking can be brought to an issue, and to point out to you how far the author of the work in question has satisfied those conditions, how far he has not satisfied them, how far they are satisfiable by man, and how far they are not satisfiable by man.
To-night, in taking up the first part of the question, I shall endeavour to put before you a sort of broad notion of our knowledge of the condition of the living world. There are many ways of doing this. I might deal with it pictorially and graphically. Following the example of Humboldt in his "Aspects of Nature," I might endeavour to point out the infinite variety of organic life in every mode of its existence, with reference to the variations of climate and the like; and such an attempt would be fraught with interest to us all; but considering the subject before us, such a course would not be that best calculated to assist us. In an argument of this kind we must go further and dig deeper into the matter; we must endeavour to look into the foundations of living Nature, if I may so say, and discover the principles involved in some of her most secret operations. I propose, therefore, in the first place, to take some ordinary animal with which you are all familiar, and by easily comprehensible and obvious examples drawn from it, to show what are the kind of problems which living beings in general lay before us; and I shall then show you that the same problems are laid open to us by all kinds of living beings. But, first, let me say in what sense I have used the words "organic nature." In speaking of the causes which lead to our present knowledge of organic nature, I have used it almost as an equivalent of the word "living," and for this reason,--that in almost all living beings you can distinguish several distinct portions set apart to do particular things and work in a particular way. These are termed "organs," and the whole together is called "organic." And as it is universally characteristic of them, the term "organic" has been very conveniently employed to denote the whole of living nature,--the whole of the plant world, and the whole of the animal world.