Unusual interest was taken in this wedding, partly on account of the splendour of the ceremony, and partly because it was understood that the Duke of Albany had won a bride admirably suited to be the companion of his refined and studious life. As he seemed destined to form a link between the Court and Culture, so it was hoped that the Duchess might become
[Illustration: THE MARRIAGE OF THE DUKE OF ALBANY.
(_From the Picture by Sir J. D. Linton, P.R.I., by Permission of the Glasgow Art Union._)]
the social head of a growing school ambitious of showing the world that the lives of women of rank, need not necessarily be absorbed by frivolity and philanthropy.
After the marriage of Prince Leopold the Queen visited the East End to open Epping Forest, which had been saved from further enclosure by the efforts of the Corporation of London. On the 4th of December her Majesty also visited in State the Royal Courts of Justice.
(_From a Photograph by Frith and Co., Reigate._)]
The death-roll of the year was a heavy one. On the 19th of April the death of Charles Darwin robbed not only England but Europe of a singularly original, painstaking, and conscientious scientific investigator. No man of his stamp has so profoundly affected the thought of the Victorian age or surveyed so wide a field of nature, in such a fair, patient, and humble spirit. His keenness of observation was only equalled by his wonderful fertility of resource. The caution with which he felt his way to just inductions, the unerring instinct with which his eye detected, amidst the maze of bewildering phenomena, the true path that led him to the secrets he sought to discover, and the masculine sagacity with which he reconciled, under broad generalisations, facts seemingly irreconcilable, confer immortality on the great work of his life. That work was his demonstration of the extraordinary effect produced on every living thing by the pressure of the conditions under which it lives--conditions which help or hinder its existence or its reproduction. The organisms which are so formed that they most easily meet the strain of these conditions survive, and their offspring bend to the same destiny. In other words, those organisms that inherit peculiarities of form and structure and stamina that best fit them to survive in the struggle for life, live. Those that do not inherit these advantages die. Such was the Darwinian hypothesis of Evolution, or the doctrine of Survival of the Fittest, and it gave to Science an impetus not less revolutionary and far-reaching than that which it received from the Baconian system.
