for his book On Man, which now might be read in a Sunday-school without surprising anybody; it was only a few years since the electors to the chair of Natural History in a famous northern University had refused to invite a very distinguished man to occupy it because he advocated the doctrine of the diversity of species of mankind, or what was called 'polygeny.' Even among those who considered man from the point of view not of vulgar prejudice, but of science, opinions lay poles asunder. Linnæus had taken one view, Cuvier another; and, among my senior contemporaries, men like Lyell, regarded by many as revolutionaries of the deepest dye, were strongly opposed to anything which tended to break down the barrier between man and the rest of the animal world."
This was the state of matters when the Origin of Species appeared, and produced a profound sensation among all thinking people. In this work Darwin traced the origin of man through a series of intermediate forms back to protoplasm, without the intervention of repeated cataclysms and creative dramas, as was generally held by the earlier geologists. "As all the living forms of life," he writes, "are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession of generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world" (loc. cit., p. 428).
