500 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



have been to Ms credit to retract it? 

 How else have the truths of science 

 and the laws of Nature been estab- 

 lished, except by righting wrong con- 

 clusions, committing mistakes and then 

 correcting them, and escaping from er- 

 roneous opinions by showing them to 

 be false? This is the essential method, 

 and the constant work of science, and 

 it is exactly here that it becomes the 

 antagonist of that method which tacit- 

 ly or openly affirms infallibility of be- 

 lief, and holds it to be a reproach and 

 a disgrace to acknowledge that one has 

 ever been mistaken. If there had been 

 no revolt against this spirit, we should 

 never have had any such thing as sci- 

 ence. 



We dismiss this much-landed book 

 with one more illustration of its qual- 

 ity. Having got through the sixth lec- 

 ture, still devoted to his main thesis 

 the deduction of immortality from pro- 

 toplasm Mr. Cook pointed the moral of 

 the occasion in the following character- 

 istic way. He said: "Here is the last 

 white and mottled bird that flew to us 

 out of the tall Tribune tower ; and softly 

 folded under its wing are these words 

 concerning Darwin, from Thomas Car- 

 lyle, at his own fireside in London." 

 He then read the sensational story that 

 has for some time past been going the 

 rounds of the newspapers about Car- 

 lyle's declaring the Darwins to be "athe- 

 ists all," with some stupid rant about 

 the gospel of dirt, and men coming from 

 monkeys and frog-spawn, and winding 

 up with his standing on the brink of 

 eternity and reviving the lessons of his 

 catechism. Mr. Cook then calls im- 

 pressively upon "Boston, and the New 

 England colleges, and all tender and 

 thoughtful souls, to listen to Thomas 

 Carlyle as he stands on the brink of 

 eternity." 



Now, we never doubted that this rep- 

 resentation, so greedily caught by press 

 and pulpit, was essentially a lie. Not 

 that Mr. Carlyle may not have included 

 Darwinism among the multitudinous 



modern things that he has been wont 

 to rave about, but this circumstantial 

 statement had all the internal evidence 

 of fabrication and falsehood. Mr. Cook 

 says it was an " extract from a letter 

 from Carlyle, published in Scotland, and 

 quoted in the London Times.' 1 '' Yet long 

 before Mr. Cook published his book the 

 story was contradicted in that journal 

 " on the best authority." The " Monday 

 lectureship " was, however, "abreast of 

 the times " only for the purpose of cir- 

 culating the scandal. The following 

 note, printed in the London Times of 

 January 20, 1877, neither appears in the 

 "Biology," nor, so far as we have ob- 

 served, has appeared in the American 

 newspapers which gave such swift pass- 

 port to the first statement : 



MR. CARLYLE ON DARWINISM. 



" L." writes : " Allow me to state on the 

 best authority that the letter about Darwin 

 and his doctrines, which was quoted in the 

 Times on the 17th inst. from the Ardrossan 

 and Saltcoats Herald, was not written by 

 him." 



This should have been quite sufficient 

 to stop the story, but some people are 

 incredulous when dirty gossip is to 

 be checked, and demand responsible 

 names. It may, therefore, be proper to 

 say that we happen to have been in- 

 formed by Herbert Spencer that the 

 note to the Times was communicated by 

 Mrs. Lecky, the wife of the historian, 

 and that she stated to Mr. Spencer before 

 its publication that, while Mr. Carlyle, 

 in pursuance of his practice of never 

 noticing misstatements, would not con- 

 tradict it himself, he had authorized 

 her to make the contradiction. It thus 

 appears that a party in England forges 

 a libelous letter, in the interest of ortho- 

 doxy, which is made to do duty in New 

 England in the same interest, while the 

 solemn adjuration to listen to the libel- 

 ous forgery is responded to with the 

 usual " applause." 



It is the frequent custom of clergy- 

 men to characterize much of the work of 

 modern scientific thinkers as "pseudo- 



