74 DUBLIN S.R.B. 1 



THOSE who are old enough to remember or who 

 have had the curiosity to study the bygone con 

 troversies of the &quot; Pope and Maguire &quot; period, and who 

 now turn their attention to the Jesuit Father Erich 

 Wasmann s Problems of Evolution (London. 1909. Kegan 

 Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. 6:.) will be struck by the 

 manner in whLh th: whole ba.i; of controversy has 

 shifted. Then t-io qu-jition; under discussion were the 

 Cult us of Our L .idy and the S.unts, the Real Presence, 

 Confession and the lik :, whiht no-.v it ij the fundamentals 

 of Christianity, evei of dl religion: belief which really 

 engage the mind-; or men. 



The history ot thi; present controversy is sufficiently 

 interesting. Father Wasmann is a very distinguished man 

 of science, and his work in connexion with ants and ter 

 mites is recognized all the world over as being of first-rate 

 importance. Moreover, he is the author of a number of 

 other works, one of which, Die Moderne Biologie und die 

 Entwicklungstheorie, we had the pleasure of commending 

 in this REVIEW on its first appearance. In this and in some 

 other of his writings he hn a r /o.ved his belief in a polyphy- 

 letic form of evolution, for which avowal he was made 

 the object of attack by Haeckel and others, who maintained 

 that in taking up this po:ition he was really trying to 

 bring about an impo:sible reconciliation between the 

 Church and Science, and in this attack, and, indeed, in 

 the subsequent cli;cussion not infrequently seemed to be 

 following the ancient advice &quot;No case, abuse the plaintiff s 

 attorney.&quot; 



It was regarded as advisable that Father Wasmann 

 should make a public presentation of his position in a 

 series of lectures delivered in Berlin, to be followed by a 

 public discussion, in which the lecturer would answer his 

 opponents criticisms. The lectures attracted enormous 

 interest in Germany, more than five hundred leading 

 articles appearing respecting them in the columns of the 

 public press of that country, and they were even alluded 

 to in the newspapers of this country, never very apt to 

 think such matters interesting to their readers. 



To commence with the end, it may be said that a peru 

 sal of the discussion in which Father Wasmann was con 

 fronted by eleven opponents, some of them men of first- 

 class importance, enables us to agree with a Protestant 

 writer in one of the papers, who, with obvious regret and 

 reluctance, admits that the Jesuit Father &quot; routed our 

 collective scientists &quot; (p. 246). Whilst, as in most discus 

 sions, there was much in this which was wholly irrelevant, 

 it is nevertheless worthv of the closest studv, for here we 



