From April 24, 1909 The April number of The Popular Science
Monthly contains a series of articles on Darwin and Darwinism,
most of them addresses delivered on the hundredth anniversary of
Darwins birth, February 12th, 1909. The impression that will be
derived by the ordinary nonscientific reader, or even by
educated people who are not closely in touch with present day
thought in biology, will be inevitably that Darwinism is still a
great force in the scientific world, an almost universally
accepted theory that now has risen almost to the higher plane of
a scientific doctrine. Of course any such idea is utterly false.
Darwinism is not evolution, but an attempt to explain evolution.
Darwin was not the first to make such an attempt of explanation;
but literally hundreds of thinkers before him made the effort
and at least half a dozen of them came as near making a
successful explanation as his has proved to be. In all of these
addresses there is practically no hint that at the present
moment the great leaders of