Abstract
ON April 19, 1882, science sustained an irreparable loss by the death of Charles Darwin in his seventy-fourth year. On April 26 of that year his mortal remains were borne on the shoulders of his comrades to his last resting-place at Westminster Abbey, where they were laid close beside the graves of Sir John Herschel and Sir Isaac Newton. At the end of last year we commemorated the centenary of the start of Darwin's famous voyage in the Beagle; three years after his return he married, and in 1842 settled at Downe, Kent. It is no exaggeration to say that the work which emanated from that quiet English home during the succeeding forty years proved more effectual than any other in making the nineteenth century illustrious. The general facts upon which the principle of evolution by natural selection is based—the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, and heredity—were all well known before Darwin's work. His claim to everlasting memory rests upon the many years of devoted labour whereby he tested the idea in all conceivable ways, amassing facts from every department of science, balancing evidence with the soundest judgment, and at last astonishing the world as with a revelation by publishing the completed theory of evolution by natural selection. Of very few men in the history of our race can it be said that they not only enlarged science but also changed it, not only added facts to the growing structure of new knowledge but also profoundly modified the basal conceptions upon which the whole structure rested: and of no one can this be said more truly than of Charles Darwin. It is a striking tribute to his memory that April 19 was declared a public holiday in the U.S.S.R. in honour of the author of the “Origin of Species”.
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In Honour of Darwin. Nature 129, 606 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129606b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129606b0