We have seen in the last chapter that whenever men have actively thought they have attempted to explain the origin of plants and animals as well as of themselves. No one who wrote previous to the time of Charles Darwin had expressed any idea concerning this matter with force enough to convince any large portion of the thinking world. If Lamarck had fallen on better times, if the great Cuvier had not laughed him to scorn, if Goethe had found him out and made him known to the world, evolution might have come into its own sooner. None of these conditions arose, and it remained for Charles Darwin to give to the world in clear and cogent form the thought of evolution. He gathered so much material before he expressed his opinions, and looked at the matter from so many sides that, when he published his results, he had foreseen most of the objections which were subsequently to arise in opposition to his announcement. Charles Darwin is recognized to-day as the father of the evolutionary movement. It has been sometimes said in recent years that Darwinism is dead, and there is a sense in which this is true. Unmodified and unassisted natural selection is not to-day considered by most scientists a sufficient agent for producing evolution. But everyone connected with the subject acknowledges Darwin as the master, and says that it was his work which converted the world to a belief in evolution. We can have no better preparation for an intelligent understanding of this subject than to consider carefully the life of this remarkable man and the circumstances under which he came to his epoch-making conclusions.