698 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ters of scientific inquiry, it is as grave an offence as the letting one's 

 note go to protest is in matters of business. In saying these things, I 

 do not mean to charge Prof. Agassiz with intellectual cowardice and 

 insincerity, for the remark which I criticise so sharply was not worthy 

 of him, it did not comport with his real character as a student of sci- 

 ence, and to judge of him by this utterance alone would be to do him 

 injustice. 



It was with the hope of finding some more legitimate objections to 

 the Darwinian theory that I procured the Tribune's lecture-sheet con- 

 taining Prof. Agassiz's twelve lectures on the natural foundations of 

 organic affinity, and diligently searched it from beginning to end. I 

 believe I am truthful in saying that a good staggering objection would 

 have been quite welcome to me, just for the sake of the intellectual 

 stimulus implied in dealing with it, for on this subject my mind was 

 so thoroughly made up thirteen years ago, that the discussion of it, 

 as ordinarily conducted, has long since ceased to have any interest for 

 me. I am just as firmly convinced that the human race is descended 

 from lower animal forms, as I am that the earth revolves in an elliptical 

 orbit about the sun. So completely, indeed, is this proposition wrought 

 in with my whole mental structure, that the negation of it seems to me 

 utterly nonsensical and void of meaning, and I doubt if my mind is ca- 

 pable of shaping such a negation into a proposition which I could intel- 

 ligently state. To have such deeply-rooted convictions shaken once in 

 a while is, I believe, a very useful and wholesome experiment in men- 

 tal hygiene. That rigidity of mind which prevents the thorough re- 

 vising of our opinions is sure, sooner or later, to come upon all of us ; 

 but we ought to dread it, as we dread the stagnation of old age or 

 death. For some such reasons as these, I am sure that I should have 

 been glad to find, in the course of Prof. Agassiz's lectures, at least one 

 powerful argument against the interpretation of organic affinities 

 which Mr. Darwin has done so much to establish. I should have 

 been still more glad to find some alternative interpretation proposed 

 which could deserve to be entertained as scientific in character. I am 

 sure no task could be more delightful, or more quickening to one's 

 energies, than that of comparing two alternative theories upon this 

 subject, upon which, thus far, only one has ever been propounded 

 which possesses the marks of a scientific hypothesis. But no such 

 pleasure or profit is in store for any one who studies these twelve lect- 

 ures of Prof. Agassiz. In all these lectures, there is not a single al- 

 lusion to Mr. Darwin's name, save once in a citation from another 

 author ; there is not the remotest allusion to any of the arguments by 

 which Mr. Darwin has contributed most largely to the establishment 

 of the development theory ; nay, there is not a single sentence from 

 which one could learn that Mr. Darwin's books had ever been written, 

 or that the theories which they expound had ever taken shape in the 

 mind of any thinking man. I do not doubt that Prof. Agassiz has, at 



