196 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



we can only express our surprise that a responsible paper should 

 have framed such an accusation without producing a particle 

 of evidence to substantiate it. 



It is impossible to conceive of statements more calculated to 

 inspire contempt and hatred of science in the popular mind, or 

 to lead that mind astray, than those which appeared in this 

 article. The "professors" of science are by implication, but perhaps 

 not intentionally, denounced as charlatans, and the mature con- 

 clusions of academic physiologists, arrived at after laborious and 

 prolonged investigations, are lightly dismissed as " untested hypo- 

 theses having no application to Man." In the earlier days of scien- 

 tific history in this country, when she was fighting and making 

 headway against the forces of superstition and bigotr}'', the Canon 

 Wilberforces of the time were the open and avowed enemies of 

 science. It can be said that they were honest men for they drew 

 forth their sword in its unsheathed nakedness. But to-day, the 

 locus of this enmity — for anything which misrepresents is a virtual 

 enmity — appears to have extended and its form to have varied, 

 for it is now no longer open and avowed, but assumes the invidious 

 guise of putative criticism, uttered in an ostensibly friendly 

 manner. It is akm to the kind of attitude that our lukewarm 

 friends adopt towards us ; it " damns with faint praise." 



When we recall the fact, as the late Professor Huxley reminded 

 us, that it was not an Autocracy, nor an Oligarchy, nor even a 

 Theocracy, but a Democracy which condemned Socrates to death, 

 we may well begin to wonder, when we read articles of this 

 harmful nature — no doubt unintentionally so — addressed to the 

 people, whether history in repeating itself has not brought us 

 back to the days when rhetorical sophists swayed the civic 

 multitude of Athens, and by the institution of such a form of 

 government thereby inevitably wrought the national destruction. 

 It compels us to remonber that there are not wanting the 

 signs that in the English life of to-day, mere orators, minor poets, 

 and tanners of the type of Lycon, Meletus, and Anytus occupy the 

 platforms in the market places, where sophistical, erroneous, and 

 inflammatory utterances find an appropriate response. And, 

 while this is so, the important conquests of science are either 

 passed by unheeded and her methods ignored, or they are mis- 

 represented and consciously or unconsciously held up to con- 

 tumely, as in the case now before us. 



We pass next to consider the particular paragraph in this 

 article with which the Mendel Journal is more directly concerned. 

 We are told by the writer " that if Mendel's law applied to 

 the human race the progeny of every negro married to a white 

 M'oman should be in definite proportions pure white, pure black, 

 and mulattoes, and this, as is well known, has never occurred." 



