594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Brougham's attack on the undulatory theory of light when it was 

 first propounded by Young, and it is chiefly remarkable for the magis- 

 terial airs assumed by a critic so fearfully and wonderfully ignorant 

 of the subject with which he deals that he believes the blood-corpus- 

 cles to be produced by evaporation of the blood ! l The following ex- 

 tracts will, however, leave no doubt that, even to so unprepared an 

 apprehension, Mr. Darwin's language was plain enough : 



" This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, heast, 

 creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants 

 of some individual ens, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the 

 action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life 

 which we see around us " (p. 231). 



"If, with Mr. Darwin, to escape the difficulty of supposing the first man at 

 his creation to possess in that framework of his body 'false marks of nourish- 

 ment from his mother's womb,' with Mr. Darwin you consider him to have been 

 an improved ape " (p. 253). 



" First, then, he (Mr. Darwin) not obscurely declares that he applies his 

 scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to Man himself, as well 

 as to the animals around him " (p. 257). 



Exactly fourteen years after this distinct testimony to the plain- 

 ness of Mr. Darwin's speech on these matters, last July, namely, the 

 very same Meview had an article entitled " Primitive Man." Pos- 

 sessed by a blind animosity against all things Darwinian, the writer 

 of this paper outrages decency by insinuations against Mr. George 

 Darwin, well calculated to damage a little-known man with the pub- 

 lic, though they sound droll enough to those who are acquainted with 

 my able and excellent friend's somewhat ascetic habits ; and, by way 

 of preparation for the attack upon the son, the anonymous reviewer 

 charges the father with deliberate duplicity : 



" It is one of the calamities of our time and country that unbelievers, instead 

 of, as in France, honestly avowing their sentiments, disguise them by studious 

 reticence as Mr. Darwin disguised, at first, his views as to the bestiality of 

 man " (loc. cit., p. 63). 



Messieurs the Reviewers, you diametrically contradict one another, 

 and one of you must bear the responsibility of a direct and deliberate 

 untruth : which is it ? The one who, writing in July, 1860, said there 

 was no obscurity about Mr. Darwin's views on this matter ? Or the 

 one who, writing in July, 1874, accuses him of having at first disguised 

 his views ? Settle it between yourselves. If it were necessary for me 

 to give an opinion on so delicate a matter, assuredly I could have no 

 ground for hesitation. For, on becoming acquainted with Mr. Dar- 

 win's views in 1858, I set myself to inquire, much more seriously than 

 I had done before, whether the hiatus between man and apes, indicated 



1 The passage is worth embalming : " Or what advantage of life could alter the shape 

 of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated ? " (loc. cit., p. 247). 



