Produced by Sigal Alon, Marcia Brooks, Fox in the Stars and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net LITTLE MASTERPIECES OF SCIENCE [Illustration: Charles R. Darwin.] Little Masterpieces of Science Edited by George Iles THE NATURALIST AS INTERPRETER AND SEER _By_ Charles Darwin Alfred R. Wallace Thomas H. Huxley Leland O. Howard George Iles NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1902 Copyright, 1902, by Doubleday, Page & Co. Copyright, 1877, by D. Appleton & Co. Copyright, 1901, by John Wanamaker Copyright, 1895, by G. H. Buek & Co. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Obvious printer's errors have been silently corrected. Hyphenated and accented words have been standardized. See the end of this file for more information. PREFACE To gather stones and fallen boughs is soon to ask, what may be done with them, can they be piled and fastened together for shelter? So begins architecture, with the hut as its first step, with the Alhambra, St. Peter's, the capitol at Washington, as its last. In like fashion the amassing of fact suggests the ordering of fact: when observation is sufficiently full and varied it comes to the reasons for what it sees. The geologist delves from layer to layer of the earth beneath his tread, he finds as he compares their fossils that the more recent forms of life stand highest in the scale of being, that in the main the animals and plants of one era are more allied to those immediately next than to those of remoter times. He thus divines that he is but exploring the proofs of lineal descent, and with this thought in his mind he finds that the collections not only of his own district, but of every other, take on a new meaning. The great seers of science do not await every jot and tittle of evidence in such a case as this. They discern the drift of a fact here, a disclosure there, and with both wisdom and boldness assume that what they see is but a promise of what shall duly be revealed. Thus it was that Darwin early in his studies became convinced of the truth of organic evolution: the labours of a lifetime of all but superhuman effort, a judicial faculty never exceeded among men, served only to confirm his confidence that all the varied forms of life upon earth have come to be what they are through an intelligible process, mainly by "natural selection."