Abstract
IT is not often that the unveiling of a statue is attended I with an interest at all comparable with that which characterised this ceremony as performed last Tuesday in the Great Hall of the Natural History Museum. If the greatness of a man is to be estimated by the measure in which he has influenced the thoughts of men it is scarcely open to question that the greatest man of our century is Charles Darwin. As Prof. Huxley remarked in the course of his singularly judicious and well-balanced address, Mr. Darwin's work has not only reconstructed the science of biology, but has spread with an organising influence through almost every department of philosophical thought Yet it was not merely the greatness of the naturalist which invested the proceedings in the Natural History Museum with an interest so unique. It was known to the whole assembly that the man whom they delighted to honour was one whose moral nature had been cast in the same lines of simple grandeur as those which belonged to his intellectual nature. It therefore only needed a passing allusion from Prof. Huxley to enable the whole assembly to reflect that it was due as much to massiveness of character as to massiveness of work that within three years of his death Mr. Darwin's name should constitute a new centre of gravity in every system of thought. And it was this reflection which gave to the ceremony so unusual a measure of interest. Around the statue were congregated the most representative men of every branch of culture, from the Prince of Wales and the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the opposite extremes of Radicalism and free-thought. Indeed, it is not too much to say that there can scarcely ever have been an occasion on which so many illustrious men of opposite ways of thinking have met to express a common agreement upon a man to whom they have felt that honour is due. The international memorial could not in any nation have found a more worthy site than the one in which it has been placed; but if anything could have added to the “solemn gladness” with which the personal friends of Mr. Darwin witnessed the presentation of this memorial, it must have been the evidence which the assembly yielded that among the innumerable differences of opinion which it represented, his memory must henceforth be always and universally regarded as a changeless monument of all that is greatest in human nature, as well as of all that is greatest in human achievement.
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The Darwin Memorial . Nature 32, 121–122 (1885). https://doi.org/10.1038/032121a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/032121a0