SCIENCE AND THE BISHOPS. 367 



advocated by the Director of the Geological Survey and no less 

 publicly discussed by many other authoritative writers has been inten- 

 tionally and systematically ignored ; he must not ascribe ill motives 

 for a course of action which is the only proper one ; and, finally, if 

 any one but myself were interested, I should say that he had better 

 not waste his time in raking up the errors of those whose lives have 

 been occupied not in talking about science, but in toiling, sometimes 

 with success and sometimes with failure, to get some real work done. 



The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their 

 readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these 

 inevitable lapses. The Duke of Argyll has now a splendid opportu- 

 nity for proving to the world in which of these categories it is here- 

 after to rank him. 



Dear Professor Huxley : A short time before Mr. Darwin's 

 death I had a conversation with him concerning the observations which 

 had been made by Mr. Murray upon coral reefs, and the speculations 

 which had been founded upon those observations. I found that Mr. 

 Darwin had very carefully considered the whole subject, and that 

 while, on the one hand, he did not regard the actual facts recorded 

 by Mr. Murray as absolutely inconsistent with his own theory of sub- 

 sidence, on the other hand, he did not believe that they necessitated 

 or supported the hypothesis advanced by Mr. Murray. Mr. Darwin's 

 attitude, as I understood it, toward Mr. Murray's objections to the 

 theory of subsidence was exactly similar to that maintained by him 

 with respect to Professor Semper's criticism, which was of a very 

 similar character ; and his position with regard to the whole question 

 was almost identical w'ith that subsequently so clearly defined by 

 Professor Dana in his well-known articles published in the "American 

 Journal of Science " for 1885. 



It is difficult to imagine how any one, acquainted with the scien- 

 tific literature of the last seven years, could possibly suggest that Mr. 

 Murray's memoir published in 1880 had failed to secure a due amount 

 of attention. Mr. Murray, by his position in the Challenger office, 

 occupied an exceptionally favorable position for making his views 

 widely known ; and he had moreover the singular good fortune to 

 secure from the first the advocacy of so able and brilliant a writer 

 as Professor Archibald Geikie, who in a special discourse and in 

 several treatises on geology and physical geology very strongly sup- 

 ported the new theory. It would be an endless task to attempt to 

 give references to the various scientific journals which have discussed 

 the subject, but I may add that every treatise on geology which has 

 been published since Mr. Murray's views were made known has 

 dealt with his observations at considerable length. This is true of 

 Professor A. H. Green's "Physical Geology" published in 1883 ; of 

 Professor Prestwich's " Geology, Chemical and Physical " ; and of 



