Actually I had gone into the Library hoping to go online, but the computers were out of action. It all looked to have been a bit hurriedly closed down & my immediate suspicion was that this was on police orders, some kind of terrorist scare - I had been startled, approaching down a side road, to find large numbers of police lurking – well, not lurking, they were obviously ‘on guard’, even though it was outside the security cordon for the Conservative Party Conference.
That mystery had been solved moments later when I saw that a local restaurant was being used for a function lunch – at least one of the guests must have been a Very Important Person in the Party. But shutting down the computers? – that’s no way to win round the voters.
My suspicions about the computers were unfounded, just another mysterious glitch, but the library staff said I was not the first to have leapt to that conclusion - shows how paranoid we all are.
Anyway I’m sure my time was put to much better use.
Weismann started by reminding his audience that his inaugural address of 41 years previously had been The Justification of the Darwinian Theory, but happily “This time, I need not speak of justifying the theory, for in the interval it has conquered the whole world. … The idea of evolution … has become the basis of the science of life.”
Darwin had been far from the first – several great minds of half a century earlier had considered the idea of evolution, including Goethe, as shown, maintained Weismann, by the lines from Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (which I have in translation as) “All shapes are similar, & none resembles another one; & so the ensemble points to a secret law, to a holy mystery”
[I am being hesitant about the translation because of the mauling given to Gordon Brown over his alleged misappropriation of Goethe during his speech to the Labour Party Conference. The Contemporary Review of 1909 did not feel any need to translate the original German for its readers]
Although the audience might think it an injustice to give almost all the credit of this fruitful discovery to Darwin alone:
“History is a severe & inexorable judge. She awards the palm not to him in whose mind an idea first arises, but to him who so establishes it that it takes a permanent place in scientific thought, for it is only then that it becomes fruitful of, & an instrument for, human progress. The credit for this establishing the theory of evolution is shared with Charles Darwin only by his contemporary, Alfred Russell Wallace, of whom we shall have to speak later”
Wallace of course was still alive in 1909; it came as a surprise to me to find that he had been appointed to the Order of Merit the previous year – today there are many who feel that he does not get enough recognition for the contribution he made, but his importance was clearly recognised by those in the know a century ago.
He may be less well remembered now, but then he did not write On the Origin of Species
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