( Ixxxvii ) 



is still with most people under its theological phase of develop- 

 ment." * And this explains the intense opposition at first 

 encountered by the principles of the " Origin." The naturalist 

 whose genius sympathised most fully with the Linnean con- 

 ception would feel that he was admitted, like a seer of old, 

 into the presence of the Maker of the Universe. His 

 convictions as to species were to him more than the conclu- 

 sions of the naturalist; they were a revelation, stirring him to 

 "break forth and prophesy." Do we not sometimes recognise 

 a lingering trace of this phase of thought in the serious shake 

 of the head and tone of profound inner conviction with 

 Avhich we are sometimes told that the speaker is decidedly of 

 the opinion that so-and-so is a perfectly good species 1 



We recognise the same sharp antagonism between two 

 irreconcilable sets of ideas when the late W. C. Hewitson 

 expressed such horror at Roland Trimen's remarkable dis- 

 covery of the polymorphic mimetic females of the Fapilio 

 merope group. The wonderfully acute detection of minute but 

 significant resemblance hidden under the widest possible 

 superficial difference, which enabled the great South African 

 naturalist to unravel the tangled relationships, was to Hewitson 

 but one of "the childish guesses of the . . . Darwinian School." 

 To meet the carefully-thought-out argument, the only objec- 

 tions that could be urged were that the conclusion stretched 

 too severely the imagination of the writer, and that it 

 shocked his notion of propriety ! f 



* Letter 132 to C. Lyell, Aug. 21, 1861. "More Letters of Charles 

 Darwin," London, 1903, i, p. 194. 



I t See an account of the controversy in Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1874, p. 

 137. The passages I have alluded to are as follows:— "P. merope, of 

 Madagascar, has a female the exact image of itself; and it would require 

 a stretch of the imagination, of which I am incapable, to believe that the 

 P. merope of the mainland, having no specific difference, indulges in a 

 whole harem of females, differing as widely from it as any species in the 

 genus. ... In the two species o[ Papilio which have lately been united, 

 Torquatus and CancUus, and Argentus and Torquatiims, though much 

 inilike each other, there is quite sufficient resemblance not to shock one's 

 notions of propriety." A little later Mr. Hewitson himself received 

 evidence of the truth of the conclusion he so disliked ; for he told how 

 his collector Rogers had sent " Papilio merope and P. hijipocoon, taken 

 by him in copulation, another illustration of the .saying that ' truth is 

 stranger than fiction.' I find it very difi&cult (even with this evidence) to 

 believe that a butterfly, which, when a resident in Madagascar, has a 

 female the image of itself, should, in West Africa, have one without any 

 resemblance to it at all" ("Entomologist's Monthly IMagazine," Oct. 

 1874, p. 113). 



