His own people wished to bury Darwin quietly at his home in Down, but Darwin now belonged to the nation. A petition signed by many public men was sent to the Dean of Westminster, asking that his body might be granted burial in the Abbey. Probably no greater honor can come to man to-day, and fortunately Dean Bradbury was broad-minded enough to acquiesce. So it came to pass that the church that had so long believed him her enemy, that had first so bitterly fought him, came at length to see that he added a new dignity and worth to her faith, and took him to her bosom. Darwin's body lies buried in the Abbey. In all the glorious company of immortal dead whose earthly frames are gathered in England's great mausoleum, there is no other one who has done so much to modify the mind of thinking man. CHAPTER III THE UNDERLYING IDEA We have seen in the preceding chapters how the idea of evolution worked its way through the minds of men. Man after man got a glimpse of the idea, even among the ancient philosophers. But no one could speak convincingly on the subject before modern times, when a wider acquaintance with the animal world gave a body of facts on which it was safe to base conclusions. Even then the idea eluded men, until there came a worker trained by a long voyage around the world in which he had nothing to do except to study nature. He finally gathered in his mind material sufficient to convince himself not only of the truth of evolution but of the process by which this evolution was brought about. Every scientific principle is simple in its basal idea. In actual life the action of the principle may be so bound up with others as to need a skillful mind for its detection. But under all the complexities and modifications, like a silver thread woven into a cloth, runs the basal idea. Until a master has detected it the presence of it may be unsuspected. But once discovered and expounded, thereafter anyone may follow out its workings. So it is with the Darwinian idea of selection. It waited long for a discoverer, but, once found, we cannot but wonder why men did not see it earlier, it is so simple. Mr. Darwin's mind, while slow and cautious, had a wonderful perseverance. When he had finished his work he had not only given a clear account of the process of evolution, but he had foreseen almost all the valid objections that were afterward to be brought against his theory. Some of them he had explained quite fully; of others he indicated a possible explanation; of still other questions he confessed that as yet they were not plain. But the whole theory is so simple in its fundamental ideas that it has completely revolutionized the whole aspect of modern biology and, indeed, of modern thinking in many lines.