i8 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Darwin and Alfred Wallace and their admirers to the pioneering 

 work of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. To repair this 

 he gives a brilliant exposition of what seemed to him the most 

 valuable portion of their teachings on evolution. His analysis 

 of Buffon's true meaning, veiled by the reticences due to the 

 conditions under which he wrote, is as masterly as the English 

 in which he develops it. His sense of wounded justice explains 

 the vigorous polemic which here, as in all his later writings, he 

 carries to the extreme. 



As a matter of fact, he never realised Charles Darwin's utter 

 lack of sympathetic understanding of the work of his French 

 precursors, let alone his own grandfather, Erasmus. Yet this 

 practical ignorance, which to Butler was so strange as to 

 transcend belief, was altogether genuine, and easy to realise 

 when we recall the position of Natural Science in the early 

 thirties, in Darwin's student days at Cambridge and for a decade 

 or two later. Catastrophism was the tenet of the day : to 

 the last it commended itself to his Professors of Botany and 

 Geology, to whom Darwin held the fervent allegiance of the 

 Indian chela to his giirn. As Geikie has recently pointed out, 

 it was only later, when Lyell had shown that the breaks in the 

 succession of the rocks were only partial and local, without 

 involving the universal catastrophes that destroyed all life and 

 rendered fresh creations thereof necessary, that any general 

 acceptance of a descent theory could be expected. We may be 

 very sure that Darwin must have received many solemn warn- 

 ings against the dangerous speculations of the " French Revolu- 

 tionary School," He himself was far too busy at the time with 

 the reception and assimilation of new facts to be awake to the 

 deeper interest of far-reaching theories. 



It is the more unfortunate that Butler's lack of appreciation 

 of these points should have led to the enormous proportion 

 of bitter personal controversy that we find in the remainder 

 of his biological writings. Possibly, as suggested by George 

 Bernard Shaw, his acquaintance and admirer, he was also 

 swayed by philosophical resentment at that banishment of mind 

 from the organic universe which was generally thought to have 

 been achieved by Charles Darwin's theory. Still, we must 

 remember that this mindless view is not implicit in Charles 

 Darwin's presentment of his own theory, nor was it accepted by 

 him as it has been by so many of his professed disciples. 



