Notes

Abstract

RARELY has so distinguished and representative an assembly been seen in Westminster Abbey as that which met to pay the last honours to Mr. Darwin, on Wednesday last week. The Abbey indeed was crowded. The character of the long line of distinguished men who followed the honoured remains to the grave, may be seen from the list of pall-bearers:—The Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Derby, Mr. J. Russell Lowell, the American Minister, Dr. W. Spottiswoode, P.R.S., Sir Joseph Hooker, Mr. A. R. Wallace, Prof. Huxley, Sir John Lubbock, and the Rev. Canon Farrar. Mr. Darwin has been buried close beside the grave of Sir John Herschel, and within two paces of that of Sir Isaac Newton. At the Royal Academy dinner on Saturday, Mr. Spottiswoode, in replying for science, could not but refer to the loss “of our greatest philosopher and noblest spirit.” “I know not,” he said, “whether, in the presence of statesmen and leaders of thought, of commanders both by sea and land, of artists, of preachers, of poets and men of letters of every kind, it is fitting that I should speak of greatness; but if patience and perseverance in good work, if a firm determination to turn neither to the right hand nor to the left, either for glory or for gain, if a continual overcoming of evil with good in any way constitute elements of greatness, then the man of whom I speak—Charles Darwin—was truly great. He lived, indeed, to a good age; he lived to complete the great work of his life; he lived to witness a revolution in public opinion on matters with which he was concerned such as few had seen before—a revolution from opposition to concurrence, a revolution from antipathy to sympathy, or whatever else may better express a complete change of front. And so having at the beginning been somewhat rudely pushed aside as an intruder and disturber of accepted opinions, he was in he end not only borne on the shoulders of his comrades to his ast resting-place, but was welcomed at the threshold by the custodians of an ancient fabric and of an ancient faith as a fitting companion of Newton and of Herschel, and of the other great men who from time to time have been gathered there.”