AGASSIZ AND DARWINISM. 695 



nothing is more certain than that a man's opinion may be eminently 

 fallible, even with reference to matters which might appear to come 

 directly within the range of his own specialty. Many people, I pre- 

 sume, think that, because Prof. Agassiz has made a specialty of the 

 study of extinct and living organisms, because he has devoted a long 

 and industrious life to this study, therefore his opinion with reference 

 to the relations of present life upon the globe to past life ought to be 

 at once conclusive. The fallacy of this inference becomes apparent as 

 soon as we recollect that Profs. Gray, Wyman, Huxley, and Haeckel, 

 who are equally well qualified to have an opinion on such matters, have 

 agreed in forming an opinion diametrically opposite to that of Prof. 

 Agassiz. But the fallacy may be shown independently of any such com- 

 parison. Even if all the foundations of certainty seem to be shaking 

 beneath us when we say that an expert is not always the best judge of 

 matters pertaining to his own specialty, we must still say it, for facts 

 will bear us out in saying it. I have known excellent mathematicians 

 and astronomers who had not the first word to say about the Nebular 

 Hypothesis : they had never felt interested in it, had never studied it, 

 and consequently did not understand it, and coidd hardly state it cor- 

 rectly. After a while one ceases to be surprised at such things. It is 

 quite possible for one to study the structure of echinoderms and fishes 

 during a long life, and yet remain unable to offer a satisfactory opin- 

 ion upon any subject connected with zoology, for the proper treatment 

 of which there are required some power of generalization and some fa- 

 miliarity with large considerations. Indeed, there are many admirable 

 experts in natural history, as well as in other studies, who never pay 

 the slightest heed to questions involving wide-reaching considera- 

 tions ; and who, with all their amazing minuteness of memory con- 

 cerning the metamorphoses of insects and the changes which the em- 

 bryo of a white-fish undergoes from fecundation to maturity, are nev- 

 ertheless unable to see the evidentiary value of the great general facts 

 of geological succession and geographical distribution, even when it 

 is thrust directly before their eyes. To such persons, " science " means 

 the collecting of polyps, the dissecting of mollusks, the vivisection of 

 frogs, the registration of innumerable facts of detail, without regard 

 to the connected story which all these facts, when put together, have 

 it in their power to tell. And all putting together of facts, with a 

 view to elicit this connected story, they are too apt to brand as unsci- 

 entific speculation ; forgetting that if Newton had merely occupied 

 himself with taking observations and measuring celestial distances, in- 

 stead of propounding an audacious hypothesis, and then patiently 

 verifying it, the law of gravitation might never have been discovered. 

 Herein lies the explanation of the twice-repeated rejection of Mr. 

 Darwin's name by the French Academy of Sciences. The lamentable 

 decline of science in France since the beginning of the Second Empire 

 has been most conspicuously marked by the tendency of scientific 



