For it is not only by their intellectual greatness that we are impressed. Every man of science is proud, and justly proud, of the grandeur of character, the unexampled generosity, the modesty and simplicity which distinguished these pioneers in a great cause. It is unfortunately true, that the votaries of science--like the cultivators of art and literature--have sometimes so far forgotten their high vocation, as to have been more careful about the priority of their personal claims than of the purity of their own motives--they have sometimes, it must be sadly admitted, allowed self-interest to obscure the interests of science. But in the story we have to relate there are no 'regrettable incidents' to be deplored; never has there occurred any event that marred the harmony in this band of fellow-workers, striving towards a great ideal. So noble, indeed, was the great central figure--Charles Darwin--that his senior Lyell and all his juniors were bound to him by the strongest ties of admiration, respect and affection; while he, in his graceful modesty, thought more of them than of himself, of the results of their labours rather than of his own great achievement. It is not, as sometimes suggested, the striking out of new ideas which is of the greatest importance in the history of science, but rather the accumulation of observations and experiments, the reasonings based upon these, and the writings in which facts and reasonings are presented to the world--by which a merely suggestive hypothesis becomes a vivifying theory--that really count in making history. Talking with Matthew Arnold in 1871, he laughingly remarked to me 'I cannot understand why you scientific people make such a fuss about Darwin. Why it's all in Lucretius!' On my replying, 'Yes! Lucretius guessed what Darwin proved,' he mischievously rejoined 'Ah! that only shows how much greater Lucretius really was,--for he divined a truth, which Darwin spent a life of labour in groping for.' Mr Alfred Russel Wallace has so well and clearly set forth the essential difference between the points of view of the cultivators of literature and science in this matter, that I cannot do better than to quote his words. They are as follows:-- 'I have long since come to see that no one deserves either praise or blame for the _ideas_ that come to him, but only for the _actions_ resulting therefrom. Ideas and beliefs are certainly not voluntary acts. They come to us--we hardly know _how_ or _whence_, and once they have got possession of us we cannot reject them or change them at will. It is for the common good that the promulgation of ideas should be free--uninfluenced by either praise or blame, reward or punishment.'