DARWIN 



fon who states clearly and emphatically what he be- 

 lieves to be the cause of variations. When he essays 

 his hypothesis of pangenesis, some years later, as the 

 cause of hereditary transformation, he asked Huxley 

 to criticise it. When the latter condemns the hypothe- 

 sis and advises Darwin to read Buffon, he is chagrined 

 to find : "It would have annoyed me extremely to have 

 re-published Buffon's views, which I did not know of, 

 but I will get the book. . . . [When he has read the 

 book, he writes again] . . . I have read Buffon : whole 

 pages are laughably like mine. It is surprising how can- 

 did it makes one to see one's views in another man's 

 words. I am rather ashamed of the whole affair, but 

 not converted to a no-belief."^° As a last instance of 

 this ignorance of the work of others and absorption 

 in his own ideas; in almost the last letter he ever 

 wrote, Darwin says: "From quotations which I had 

 seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I 

 had not the most remote notion what a wonderful 

 man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two 

 gods, though in very different ways, but they were 

 mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. "^^ It is perhaps ex- 

 cusable that the author of an hypothesis should be 

 blind to the work of others, but it is a curious com- 

 mentary on those who, like Huxley, knew the essen- 

 tial similarity between Darwinism and the theories 

 of other evolutionists and yet would condemn the lat- 



10 Life and Letters, vol. II, p. 228. 

 ^^Ibid., vol. II, p. 427. 



C 203 3 



