“Sprung from a race of theologians, this celebrated man combated to the last the theory of natural selection. One of the many times I had the pleasure of meeting him in the United States was at Mr. Winthrop’s beautiful residence at Brookline, near Boston. Rising from luncheon, we all halted, as if by a common impulse in front of a window, and continued there a discussion which had been started at table. The maple was in its autumn glory; and the exquisite beauty of the scene outside seemed, in my case, to interpenetrate without disturbance the intellectual action. Earnestly, almost sadly, Agassiz turned and said to the gentlemen standing round, ‘I confess that I was not prepared to see this theory received as it has been by the best intellects of our time. Its success is greater than I could have thought possible.’”[J] The history of science can hardly supply anything more sad than the blight which may fall on a man’s career because he is unable, from conscientious motives, to use some great means of advance. Such a weapon for the progress of science was provided by the Darwinian theory, and men were to be henceforth divided according to their use or neglect of the new opportunities. Men who up to that time had been equals were to be for ever separated, some to press forward in the front rank of scientific discovery, others to remain as interesting relics of a byegone age. It is hardly necessary to say that this does not apply to men, like Agassiz, who had already left their mark deep upon the science of their day, but it has a very real application to those men whose position was to be estimated by work done after the year 1858. In the midst of those years of struggle and anxiety which followed the appearance of the “Origin,” we meet with another instance of the same extraordinary foresight which appeared in his contention in favour of the persistence of the great oceans and continental areas. I refer to his views on spontaneous generation--a very ancient belief, and one which from time to time has been the will-o’-the-wisp of biological speculation, leading it into all kinds of fruitless and dangerous regions.[K] Dr. Carpenter’s “Introduction to the Study of Foraminifera” had been reviewed in the _Athenæum_ (March 28th, 1863), the writer attacking evolution and favouring spontaneous generation, or, as it was then called, heterogeny. Darwin wrote to Hooker, who had lent him a copy of the paper, “Who would have ever thought of the old stupid _Athenæum_ taking to Oken-like transcendental philosophy written in Owenian style!... It will be some time before we see ‘slime, protoplasm, etc.,’ generating a new animal.... It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.” In 1871 he wrote:--