BIOLOGICAL WRITINGS OF SAMUEL BUTLER 17 



of a unified biology. For this purpose they found their actual 

 scientific equipment so inadequate that they were fully occupied 

 in inventing fresh technique and working therewith at facts — 

 save a few critics, such as St. George Mivart, who was regarded 

 as negligible, since he evidently held a brief for a party standing 

 outside the scientific world. 



Butler introduced himself as what we now call " The Man in 

 the Street," far too bare of scientific clothing to satisfy the Mrs. 

 Grundy of the domain ; lacking all recognised tools of science 

 and all sense of the difficulties in his way, he proceeded to 

 tackle the problems of science with little save the deft pen 

 of the literary expert in his hand. His very failure to appreciate 

 the difficulties gave greater power to his work — much as Tar- 

 tarin of Tarascon ascended the Jungfrau and faced successfully 

 all dangers of Alpine travel, so long as he believed them to be 

 the mere blagues de reclame of the wily Swiss host. His brilliant 

 qualities of style and irony themselves told heavily against him. 

 Was he not already known for having written the most trench- 

 ant satire that had appeared since Gulliver s Travels ? Had 

 he not sneered therein at the very foundations of society, and 

 followed up its success by a pseudo-biography that had taken 

 in the Record and the Rock ? In Life and Habit^ at the very 

 start, he goes out of his way to heap scorn on the respected 

 names of Marcus Aurelius, Lord Bacon, Goethe, Arnold of 

 Rugby, and Dr. W. B. Carpenter. He expressed the lowest 

 opinion of the Fellows of the Royal Society. To him the pro- 

 fessional man of science, with self-conscious knowledge of his 

 ideal and aim, was a medicine-man, priest, augur — useful, per- 

 haps, in his way, but to be carefully watched by all who value 

 freedom of thought and person, lest with opportunity he 

 develop into a persecutor of the worst type. Not content with 

 blackguarding the audience to whom his work should most 

 appeal, he went on to depreciate that work itself and its author 

 in his finest vein of irony. Having argued that our best and 

 highest knowledge is that of whose possession we are most 

 ignorant, he proceeds : " Above all, let no unwary reader do me 

 the injustice of believing in me. In that I write at all I am 

 among the damned." 



His writing of Evolution, Old and New (1879), was due 

 to his conviction that scant justice had been done by Charles 



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