REVIEWS OF DEVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.* 389 



ignorance, that strikes the keynote of our existing 

 criticism. Men write without taking the trouble to 

 read or think."* 



***** 



The ' Saturday Eevievv ' attacked ' Evolution, Old and 

 New/ I may almost say savagely. It wrote : " When 

 Mr. Butler's 'Life and Habit' came before us, we 

 doubted whether his ambiguously expressed speculations 

 belonged to the regions of playful but possibly scientific 

 imagination, or of unscientific fancies ; and we gave him 

 the benefit of the doubt. In fact, we strained a point or 

 two to find a reasonable meaning for him. He has now 

 settled the question against himself. Not professing to 

 have any particular competence in biology, natural his- 

 tory, or the scientific study of evidence in any shape 

 whatever, and, indeed, rather glorying in his freedom 

 from any such superfluities, he undertakes to assure the 

 overwhelming majority of men of science, and the 

 educated public who have followed their lead, that, while 

 they have done well to be converted to the doctrine of 

 the evolution and transmutation of species, they have 

 been converted on entirely wrong grounds." 



***** 



" When a writer who has not given as many weeks 

 to the subject as Mr. Darwin has given years [as a 

 matter of fact, it is now twenty years since I began to 

 publish on the subject of Evolution] is not content to 

 air his own crude, though clever, fallacies, but presumes 

 to criticize Mr. Darwin with the superciliousness of a 

 young schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is 



* 'Fortnightly Review,' March 1, 1882, pp. 344, 345. 



