It is largely the qualities that prevent us from ranking Darwin as a genius that establish his eminence as a research scientist. He is great not for his ideas, for they had been worked out before him, but for the clearness with which he stated his conclusions, and the wealth of proof which he brought to their defence. The earliest evolutionists tried to solve their problems by deduction, making the theory first, and searching for the facts afterward. Darwin’s method was just the opposite. As he himself says, he searched for fact after fact, at the same time straining to keep all thought of theory from his mind. Finally, when he had ascertained how things actually were, and had arranged his information, he set forth to formulate a theory that might accord fully with what he knew to be the truth. He took the ancient, indefinite idea of evolution and welded it into an organized theory, and armed it with an array of facts that made it irresistible. While some of Darwin’s beliefs have failed to show the importance he assigned them, and others of them are very probably errors, there are few indeed who seriously, from the standpoint of science, care to question the conception that all living things have developed from earlier living things of simpler or more primitive character. His careful, painstaking work gained for his ideas a world wide acceptance among thinking men, and made Charles Darwin one of the greatest figures in the history of science. The story of Darwin’s life is a story of long, careful study and preparation, of rapid publication of his discoveries when he set out to write them, and finally of triumph over those who opposed him. He was born on the twelfth of February, 1809, the same day that brought the world Abraham Lincoln. Someone has said that on that day the world’s greatest liberators were born--in America the one who would free the bodies of men from bondage; in England the man who would free their minds from a no less real slavery to custom, power, and worn-out dogma.