But the scientific literature of the past sixty years might almost be said to be summarised in the work of =Charles Darwin (1809-1882)=. A funeral in Westminster Abbey, amid the mourning of many nations, closed the career of one whose life-work had often been greeted with scorn. "Our century is Darwin's century," said a leading German newspaper (_Allgemeine Zeitung_) at his death, and the statement is no exaggeration. Those who witnessed the long stream of prelates and nobles who filed through the Abbey at his funeral, the then Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr Tait) and the present Prime Minister (Lord Salisbury) among the number, could not but recall the reception of the great investigator's theory twenty years before. Bishop Wilberforce in particular denounced it in the _Quarterly Review_ as "a flimsy speculation." Darwin's antecedents were of a nature such as, on the principle of heredity, a great man should possess. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a poet, whose "Botanic Garden" may still be read with interest. His maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter. Darwin was the son of a doctor of Shrewsbury, and was educated at the Grammar School of that city and at Christ's College, Cambridge. Here his natural history studies were sympathetically directed by Professor Henslow, the botanist, by whose recommendation he was selected to accompany the _Beagle_ on its expedition to survey the South American coast. The results of his travels were embodied in his first important work, "Journals of Researches during a Voyage round the World," which was published in 1839, and was republished under the title of "A Naturalist's Voyage round the World." In the same year he married his cousin, Miss Wedgwood, and, after a few years of London life, took up his residence in a pleasant country house at Down, near Beckenham, in Kent. Here he pursued his remarkable investigations until his death, surrounded by his accomplished children, and finding, as he told a friend, his highest emotional gratification in the joys of family life and a love of animate nature. Two of his sons, George Howard Darwin and Francis Darwin, have done good work in science, the one in geology and astronomy, the other in botany. Darwin himself wrote also on the "Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs," revolutionising the popular view concerning these remarkable phenomena. Discovering that reef-building polyps cannot live at depths of more than twenty fathoms, he found it necessary to explain the presence of rocks built by them which rise from more than 2000 feet below the surface of the sea. This he did on the hypothesis of a gradual subsidence of the sea-floor whilst the polyps are at work. This view has since been generally accepted by geologists, although somewhat modified by Dr John Murray's observation in the _Challenger_ expedition, that the reefs are not always of solid coral, and that they may in many cases