This is all very naïve, and accords perfectly with the introductory paragraphs of the “Origin of Species;” it gives us the same picture of a solitary thinker, a poor, lonely, friendless student of nature, who had never so much as heard of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, or Lamarck. Unfortunately, however, we cannot forget the description of the influences which, according to Mr. Grant Allen, did in reality surround Mr. Darwin’s youth, and certainly they are more what we should have expected than those suggested rather than expressly stated by Mr. Darwin. “Everywhere around him,” says Mr. Allen, {174a} “in his childhood and youth these great but formless” (why “formless”?) “evolutionary ideas were brewing and fermenting. The scientific society of his elders and of the contemporaries among whom he grew up was permeated with the leaven of Laplace and Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel. Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among plants and animals. Those who believed in the doctrine of Buffon and of the ‘Zoonomia,’ and those who disbelieved in it, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the far-reaching implications of that fundamental problem. On every side evolutionism, in its crude form.” (I suppose Mr. Allen could not help saying “in its crude form,” but descent with modification in 1809 meant, to all intents and purposes, and was understood to mean, what it means now, or ought to mean, to most people.) “The universal stir,” says Mr. Allen on the following page, “and deep prying into evolutionary questions which everywhere existed among scientific men in his early days was naturally communicated to a lad born of a scientific family and inheriting directly in blood and bone the biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus Darwin.” I confess to thinking that Mr. Allen’s account of the influences which surrounded Mr. Darwin’s youth, if tainted with picturesqueness, is still substantially correct. On an earlier page he had written:—“It is impossible to take up any scientific memoirs or treatises of the first half of our own century without seeing at a glance how every mind of high original scientific importance was permeated and disturbed by the fundamental questions aroused, but not fully answered, by Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. In Lyell’s letters, and in Agassiz’s lectures, in the ‘Botanic Journal’ and in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ in treatises on Madeira beetles and the Australian flora, we find everywhere the thoughts of men profoundly influenced in a thousand directions by this universal evolutionary solvent and leaven.