272 THE SPREAD OF EVOLUTION. [ch. xiv. 



nceum reviews of you, and of Huxley* especially. Your 

 object to make man old, and Huxley's object to degrade him. 

 The wretched writer has not a glimpse of what the discov- 

 ery of scientific truth means. How splendid some pages 

 are in Huxley, but I fear the book will not be popular. . . . 



In the Atlienceum, Mar. 28, 1862, p. 417, appeared a no- 

 tice of Dr. Carpenter's book on 4 Foraminifera,' which led 

 to more skirmishing in the same journal. The article was 

 remarkable for upholding spontaneous generation. 



My father wrote, Mar. 29, 1863 : 



" Many thanks for Atlienceum, received this morning, 

 and to be returned to-morrow morning. Who would have 

 ever thought of the old stupid Atlienceum taking to Oken- 

 like transcendental philosophy written in Owenian style ! 



" It will be some time before we see ' slime, protoplasm, 

 &c.' generating a new animal. But I have long regretted 

 that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal 

 term of creation, f by which I really meant ' appeared ' by 

 some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish, think- 

 ing at present of the origin of life ; one might as well think 

 of the origin of matter." 



The Atlienceum continued to be a scientific battle-ground. 

 On April 4, 1863, Falconer wrote a severe article on Lyell. 

 And my father wrote {Atlienceum, 1863, p. 554), under the 

 cloak of attacking spontaneous generation, to defend Evo- 

 lution. In reply, an article appeared in the same Journal 

 (May 2nd, 1863, p. 586), accusing my father of claiming 

 for his views the exclusive merit of " connecting by an in- 

 telligible thread of reasoning " a number of facts in mor- 

 phology, &c. The writer remarks that, " The different gen- 

 eralisations cited by Mr. Darwin as being connected by an 

 intelligible thread of reasoning exclusively through his at- 

 tempt to explain specific transmutation are in fact related 

 to it in this wise, that they have prepared the minds of natu- 

 ralists for a better reception of such attempts to explain the 

 way of the origin of species from species." 



* Marts Place in Nature, 1863. 



t This refers to a passage in which the reviewer of Dr. Carpenter's hook 

 speaks of " an operation of force," or " a concurrence of forces which have now 

 no place in nature," as being, " a creative force, in fact, which Darwin could 

 only express in Pentateuchal terms as the primordial form 'into which life 

 was first breathed.' " The conception of expressing a creative force as a pri- 

 mordial form is the reviewer's. 



