1858-64.] DARWIN ON LAMARCK. 121 



and all three constantly applied lawyers' methods to 

 natural history. No one of them possessed the natu- 

 ralist spirit and turn of mind. 



Of Joseph Prestwich, Darwin says, " I fear he is too 

 much of a catastrophist." For him " Huxley is a 

 regular reviewer." Never a man was more inclined to 

 paradoxes than was Darwin. For instance, he says, 

 "A compiler is a great man, and an original man, a 

 commonplace man"; "only fools can generalize and 

 speculate " (in a letter to Hooker). His treatment of* 

 Lamarck's views and observations do not speak in his 

 favour, for in one place he says that Lamarck's work 

 appears to him " extremely poor " ; and again, " I got 

 not a fact or idea from it." Lamarck's book is "ab- 

 surd, an absolutely useless book," and all that Lamarck 

 did is " rubbish." However, he admits that Lamarck is 

 the only exception among all those who have described 

 species, for he did not believe in the immutability and 

 permanence of species. 



Darwin applied the word "rubbish" rather at random, 

 and not always to the point. For instance, he charac- 

 terized by that title the great discovery of the antiquity 

 of man by Boucher de Perthes at Amiens, and a few 

 months later he scolds Lyell for not rendering suffi- 

 cient justice to Boucher de Perthes in his book " The 

 Antiquity of Man," saying that " Boucher de Perthes 

 has done for man something like what Agassiz did for 

 glaciers." 



On the whole, Darwin was a great sceptic, and a 

 lover of paradoxes, full of preconceived ideas, although 

 he constantly protested that he had never had any, ex- 



