[Gutenberg 6430] • The Evolution of Man — Volume 1

Excerpt from the book...

The work which we now place within the reach of every reader of the

English tongue is one of the finest productions of its distinguished

author. The first edition appeared in 1874. At that time the

conviction of man's natural evolution was even less advanced in

Germany than in England, and the work raised a storm of controversy.

Theologians--forgetting the commonest facts of our individual

development--spoke with the most profound disdain of the theory that a

Luther or a Goethe could be the outcome of development from a tiny

speck of protoplasm. The work, one of the most distinguished of them

said, was "a fleck of shame on the escutcheon of Germany." To-day its

conclusion is accepted by influential clerics, such as the Dean of

Westminster, and by almost every biologist and anthropologist of

distinction in Europe. Evolution is not a laboriously reached

conclusion, but a guiding truth, in biological literature to-day.