Darwin's book first
appeared, and to understand what he meant, and what was generally meant,
by discovering their "origin." It is for want of this preliminary
knowledge that the majority of educated persons who are not naturalists
are so ready to accept the innumerable objections, criticisms, and
difficulties of its opponents as proofs that the Darwinian theory is
unsound, while it also renders them unable to appreciate, or even to
comprehend, the vast change which that theory has effected in the whole
mass of thought and opinion on the great question of evolution.
The term "species" was thus defined by the celebrated botanist De
Candolle: "A species is a collection of all the individuals which
resemble each other more than they resemble anything else, which can by
mutual fecundation produce fertile individuals, and which reproduce
themselves by generation, in such a manner that we may from analogy
suppose them all to have sprung from one single individual." And the
zoologist Swainson gives a somewhat similar definition: "A species, in
the usual acceptation of the term, is an animal which, in a state of
nature, is distinguished by certain peculiarities of form, size, colour,
or other circumstances, from another animal.
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