NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 149 



But Lyell, like the honest man he was, yielded, unreservedly 

 to the mass of new proofs arrayed on the side of evolution as 

 against that of creation. 



At the same time came Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, giv- 

 ing new and most cogent arguments in favor of evolution by 

 natural selection. 



In 1871 was published Darwin's Descent of Man. Its doctrine 

 had indeed been anticipated by critics of his previous books, but 

 it none the less gave a great stir to the opposite side ; again the 

 opposing army trooped forth, though evidently with much less 

 heart than before. A few were very violent. In the Dublin Uni- 

 versity Magazine Mr. Darwin was charged, after the legendary 

 Hibernian fashion, with seeking " to displace God by the unerring 

 action of vagary," and as being " resolved to hunt God out of the 

 world." But most notable from this side of the older Church was 

 the elaborate answer to Darwin's book by the eminent French 

 Catholic physician. Dr. Constantin James. In his work. On Dar- 

 winism, or the Man- Ape, published at Paris in 1877, Dr. James 

 not only refuted Darwin scientifically but poured contempt on his 

 book, calling it " a fairy tale," and hesitating to take it seriously, 

 since a work " so fantastic and so burlesque " was, doubtless, only 

 a huge joke, like Erasmus's Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu's 

 Persian Letters. The princes of the Church were delighted. The 

 Cardinal Archbishop of Paris assured the author that the book 

 had become his "spiritual reading," and begged him to send a 

 copy to the Pope himself. His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, acknowl- 

 edged the gift in a remarkable letter. He thanked his dear son, 

 the writer, for the book in which he "refutes so well the aber- 

 rations of Darwinism. ... A system," he adds, " which is repug- 

 nant at once to history, to the tradition of all peoples, to exact 

 science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would 

 seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the 

 leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a sup- 

 port in all this tissue of fables. . . . And, in fact, pride, after 

 rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man inde- 

 pendent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his 

 own God pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level 

 of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus 

 unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration. When pride 

 Cometh, then cometh shame. But the corruption of this age, the 

 machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand 

 that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should 

 since they borrow the mask of science be refuted by true sci- 

 ence." Wherefore the Pope thanks Dr. James for his book, " so 

 opportune and so perfectly appropriate to the exigencies of our 

 time," and bestows on him the apostolic benediction. Nor was 



