The opening of Preface
[BY JOSEPH MCCABE]
The work which we now place within the reach of every reader of the English tongue is one of the finest productions of its distinguished author. The first edition appeared in 1874. At that time the conviction of man’s natural evolution was even less advanced in Germany than in England, and the work raised a storm of controversy. Theologians—forgetting the commonest facts of our individual development—spoke with the most profound disdain of the theory that a Luther or a Goethe could be the outcome of development from a tiny speck of protoplasm. The work, one of the most distinguished of them said, was “a fleck of shame on the escutcheon of Germany.” To-day its conclusion is accepted by influential clerics, such as the Dean of Westminster, and by almost every biologist and anthropologist of distinction in Europe. Evolution is not a laboriously reached conclusion, but a guiding truth, in biological literature to-day.