general adherence to his principles and a more than generous aid in promulgating his doctrine. Lyell was an older man, and his Principles of Geology had long been a classic. This book inspired students destined to become leaders in the revolution of thought which was taking place in the last half of the nineteenth century. One of these writes:

Were I to assert that if the Principles of Geology had not been written, we should never have had the Origin of Species, I think I should not be going too far: at all events, I can safely assert, from several conversations I had with Darwin, that he would have most unhesitatingly agreed in that opinion.1

Sir Joseph Hooker, whose great experience as a traveller and a systematic botanist, and one who had in his time the widest knowledge of the distribution of plants, was of invaluable assistance to Darwin on the botanical side of his researches. Those who remember Hooker will remember him as a man of ripe experience, sound judgment and a very evenly balanced mind. But all these high and by no means common qualities were combined with caution, and with a critical faculty which was quite invaluable to Darwin at this juncture. Huxley was of a somewhat different temperament. He was rather proud of the fact that he was named after the doubting apostle; but, whatever Huxley doubted, he never doubted himself. He had clear-cut ideas which he was capable of expressing in the most vigorous and the most cultivated English. Both on platform and on paper he was a keen controversialist. He contributed much to our knowledge of morphology. But never could he have been mistaken for a field-naturalist. In the latter part of his life he was drawn away from pure science by the demands of public duty, and he was, undoubtedly, a power in the scientific world. For he was ever one of that small band in England who united scientific accuracy and scientific training with influence on the political and official life of the country.

It is somewhat curious that the immediate effect of the publication of The Origin of Species and of the acceptance of its theories by a considerable and ever-increasing number of experts did not lead to the progress of research along the precise lines Darwin himself had followed. To trace the origin of animals 1 Judd, J. W., op. cit.

I

and plants and their interconnection was still the object of zoologists and botanists, but the more active researchers of the last part of the nineteenth century attacked the problem from standpoints in the main other than that of Darwin. The accurate description of bodily structure and the anatomical comparison of the various organs was the subject of one school of investigators: Rolleston's Forms of Animal Life, re-edited by Hatchett Jackson, Huxley's Vertebrate and Invertebrate Zoologies, and Milnes Marshall's Practical Zoology testify to this. Another school took up with great enthusiasm the investigation of animal embryology, the finest output of which was Balfour's Text-Book of Embryology, published in 1880. Francis Maitland Balfour occupied a chair, especially created for him at Cambridge university, in 1882, and, for a time, Cambridge became a centre for this study, and Balfour's pupil, Sedgwick, carried on the tradition. Members of yet another school devoted themselves to the minute structure of the cell and to the various changes which the nucelus undergoes during cell-division. Animal histology has, however, been chiefly associated with physiology; and, as this chapter is already greatly overweighted, we have had to leave physiology on one side. The subjects of degeneration, as shown by such forms as the sessile tunicata, the parasitic crustacea and many internal parasitic worms, with the last of which the name of Cobbold is associated, also received attention, and increased interest was shown in the pathogenic influence of internal parasites upon their hosts.

Towards the end of our period, a number of new schools of biological thought arose. As Judd tells us:

Mutationism, Mendelism, Weismannism, Neo-Lamarckism, Biometrics, Eugenics and what not are being diligently exploited. But all of these vigorous growths have their real roots in Darwinism. If we study Darwin's correspondence, and the successive essays in which he embodied his views at different periods, we shall find, variation by mutation (or per saltum), the influence of environment, the question of the inheritance of acquired characters and similar problems were constantly present to Darwin's ever open mind, his views upon them changing from time to time, as fresh facts were gathered.

Like everything else, these new theories are deeply rooted in the past.

T

CHAPTER IX

Anglo-Irish Literature

HE early classical culture of Ireland, her literary technique in her native Gaelic and the equipment of solid learning that enabled her missionaries to evangelise much of western Europe, have always been a source of puzzled surprise to the modern historian.

Only quite recently has the veil been lifted from this perplexing historical problem. For Zimmer has proved that the remarkable early Irish erudition was due to an exodus of Gaulish scholars into Ireland owing to the devastation of their country by the Huns, Vandals, Goths and Alans. They avoided England, which, at the time, was suffering from continental invasions; they sought Ireland because it was known, through the traders plying between the mouths of the Loire and Garonne and the south and east coasts of Ireland, to be not only a fertile and prosperous country but, also, to be already favourable to the Christian religion. Two circumstances conspired to establish the success of the influx of Gaulish scholars and divines with their precious manuscripts. For they reached Ireland with a learning that, as has been said,

was still to the full extent the best tradition of scholarship in Latin Grammar, Oratory and Poetry, together with a certain knowledge of Greek-in fact the full classical lore of the 4th Century.

They arrived, also, at a time when the Irish were most ready to receive them. For they found native schools of Irish oratory and poetry in which their Brehons or jurists and Filidh (Filé) or poets were being laboriously trained. To use Bede's expression, "it was not book-Latin but a living speech and a

literature in the making that was now heard in many parts of Ireland."

No wonder, then, that a fusion of Gaelic and classical literature began to take place. Thus, Irish bards fell into the metres of Latin hymns sung in the churches, and introduced final and internal rime, and a regularly recurring number of syllables, into their native poetry from the Latin; though Sigerson and others would have us believe that rime came into Latin from the Gaels or their kinsmen the Gauls, and that Cicero's famous O fortunatam natam me Consule Romam shows this Celtic influence on Latin poetry. Moreover, there was drawn into the Gaelic tongue a form of rhythmic prose to be found in very early Gaelic writings, notably the incantation of Amorgen, known as rosg, which still has its counterpart in the Welsh preachers' hwel or rhetorical cadence.

So complete a removal, westward, of classical scholarship was thus made in the fourth century that, at the end of the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris declares that he knew of but one scholar at Trèves, Argogastis, who could speak and write pure Latin. But the lucky Irish, all this while, were enjoying the full gift of classical learning, and that at a time before scruples had arisen in the minds of professors of Christianity against the study of classics, owing to the pagan doctrines which pervaded them. They, therefore, gave themselves up whole-heartedly to it, and when, as missionaries and scholars, they carried back this classical learning to the continent at the end of the fifth century, they were amazed to find that they and their fellowcountrymen were almost its sole possessors.

The interfusion of the Gaulish classical and Christian and the Gaelic schools of literature, thus early in Irish history, not only made for a singular forbearance towards such pagan themes as are to be found in The Colloquy of St. Patrick with Oisin (Ossian), but, also, gave to the religious poems of the Irish saints and the curiously free Gaelic translations from Vergil and other classical writings a picturesque individuality which makes them delightful reading.

Gaelic poetry resolves itself roughly into fairy poetry or pagan supernatural poetry, early and later religious poetry, nature poetry, war poetry, love poetry and what may be termed official poetry, i.e. that of the bards as court poets, and

as poets attached to the great chieftains whose exploits and nuptials they celebrated and whose dirges they sang; while, here and there, specimens of Irish satirical poetry are to be met throughout the three periods of ancient, middle and later Irish, into which leading scholars are agreed in dividing the works left to us in Irish Gaelic.

The early war poetry does not call for special comment beyond this; as was to have been expected, it largely consists of laudations of chieftains of a fiercely barbaric kind, and abounds with picturesque descriptive phraseology. Thus, in Deirdre's Lament over the Sons of Usnagh, they are variously described as "three lions from the Hill of the Cave," "three dragons of Dun Monidh" and "three props of the battle-host of Coolney." But, running through the savage and demonic incidents that characterise the early Irish epics, there is a vein of generosity of one heroic combatant towards another, the desire to fight fair and even to succour a failing enemy, strangely anticipatory of the spirit of medieval chivalry.

Of official poetry, it may be said that its technique is extremely elaborate and, since it was necessary to put as much thought as possible into each self-contained quatrain, its condensations often make very hard sayings of these early ranns. A love of, or tendency towards, the supernatural permeates early and middle Irish poetry, as, indeed, it also pervades The History of Ireland by Geoffrey Keating, the Irish Herodotus, who wrote as late as 1634; and much of the fascination of Gaelic verse is due to the intrusion of the glamour of "the other world" into its pages.

Love poetry, among the earliest of its kind in Europe, not only finds poignant expression in such an early Irish poem as What is Love?-an expression as definite in its description of the sufferings of a lover as can be found even in Shakespeare's Sonnets-but the love lyrics interspersed among Irish prose romances are generally uttered by famous women whose adventures are there described with a passionate purity and tender, delicate feeling rarely met with in the heroines of the Arthurian cycles.

One other characteristic distinguishes old Gaelic poetry from that of contemporary European writers-that love of nature described by Matthew Arnold as natural magic and,