The idea of Evolution, or Transformation as it is now sometimes called, was not first conceived by Charles Darwin, nor by Alfred Russel Wallace, who observed the operation of Circumstantial Selection simultaneously with Charles.  The celebrated Buffoon was a better Evolutionist than either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon was born, the Greek philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of life are transformations of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, effected by the two innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love and hate.  As lately as 1860 I myself was taught as a child that everything was made out of these four elements.  Both the Empedocleans and the Evolutionists were opposed to those who believed in the separate creation of all forms of life as described in the book of Genesis.  This ’conflict between religion and science’, as the phrase went then, did not perplex my infant mind in the least:  I knew perfectly well, without knowing that I knew it, that the validity of a story is not the same as the occurrence of a fact.  But as I grew up I found that I had to choose between Evolution and Genesis.  If you believed that dogs and cats and snakes and birds and beetles and oysters and whales and men and women were all separately designed and made and named in Eden garden at the beginning of things, and have since survived simply by reproducing their kind, then you were not an Evolutionist.  If you believed, on the contrary, that all the different species are modifications, variations, and elaborations of one primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then you were an Evolutionist.  But you were not necessarily a Darwinian; for you might have been a modern Evolutionist twenty years before Charles Darwin was born, and a whole lifetime before he published his Origin of Species.  For that matter, when Aristotle grouped animals with backbones as blood relations, he began the sort of classification which, when extended by Darwin to monkeys and men, so shocked my uncle.

Genesis had held the field until the time (1707-1778) of Linnaeus the famous botanist.  In the meantime the microscope had been invented.  It revealed a new world of hitherto invisible creatures called Infusorians, as common water was found to be an infusion of them.  In the eighteenth century naturalists were very keen on the Infusorian Amoebas, and were much struck by the way in which the members of this old family behaved and developed.  But it was still possible for Linnaeus to begin a treatise by saying ’There are just so many species as there were forms created in the beginning,’ though there were hundreds of commonplace Scotch gardeners, pigeon fanciers, and stock breeders then living who knew better.  Linnaeus himself knew better before he died.  In the last edition of his System of Nature, he began to wonder whether the transmutation of species by variation might not be possible.  Then came the great poet who jumped over the facts