respectfully to the grave with frank and noble inconsistency the honoured remains of the very teacher whom less than a quarter of a century earlier they had naturally dreaded as loosening the traditional foundations of all accepted religion and morality. But if the attack was fierce and bitter, the defence was assisted by a sudden access of powerful forces from friendly quarters. A few of the elder generation of naturalists held out, indeed, for various shorter or longer periods; some of them never came into the camp at all, but lingered on, left behind, like stragglers from the onward march, by the younger biologists, in isolated non-conformity on the lonely heights of austere officialism. Their business was to ticket and docket and pigeon-hole, not to venture abroad on untried wings into the airy regions of philosophical speculation. The elder men, in fact, had many of them lost that elasticity and modifiability of intellect which is necessary for the reception of new and revolutionary fundamental concepts. A mind that has hardened down into the last stage of extreme maturity may assimilate fresh facts and fresh minor principles, but it cannot assimilate fresh synthetic systems of the entire cosmos. Moreover, some of the elder thinkers were committed beforehand to opposing views, with which they lacked either the courage or the intellectual power to break; while others were entangled by religious restrictions, and unable to free themselves from the cramping fetters of a narrow orthodoxy. But even among his own contemporaries and seniors Darwin found not a few whose minds were thoroughly prepared beforehand for the reception of his lucid and luminous hypothesis; while the younger naturalists, with the plasticity of youth, assimilated almost to a man, with the utmost avidity, the great truths thus showered down upon them by the preacher of evolution.