154 DAKWINIAXISM. 



respect. In a letter to Mr. Huxley (ii. 281, note), he 

 writes : " The inaccuracy of the blessed gang (of which 

 I am one) of compilers passes all bounds I must show 

 how we jolly fellows work ; " and then follows an account 

 of a circumstance which, in its triple rise of descriptive 

 perversion, falls very little short of the successive stages 

 of the three black crows. Just at the end of the 

 Autobiographical Chapter, too, he records three cases of 

 false statement of facts which, as such as are calculated to 

 stultify compilers, he himself was the means of exposing. 

 What in a way is a fourth case concerns the funny story 

 of the bean-pod : " The beans this year have all grown on 

 the wrong side!" All over England, newspaper after 

 newspaper caught up the cry. Only Mr. Darwin's own 

 gardener was too knowing a man to be taken in. " Oh 

 no, sir," he said, " it must be a mistake, for the beans 

 grow on the wrong side only on leap-year, and this is 

 not leap-year ! " 



Mr. Darwin, however, with all his wakofulness, is still, 

 he says (i. 104), " not very sceptical ;" and he feels sure 

 that other scientific men have suffered in their inquiries 

 just by being so. There is even not altogether absent 

 on the outside, so to speak, a sort of feeling that Mr. 

 Darwin I really have heard as much, and by experts, 

 more than once said was somewhat " easy " in the 

 accounts which as a compiler he received. When one 

 considers of it, indeed, something such seems not un- 

 likely to have been the state of the case. It is quite 

 certain (as will be clearer in the sequel) that there was 

 no wish nearer his soul than the establishment of the 

 physical origin of species. Every jot, and dot, and tittle 

 of evidence that could be construed to make in any way 

 t'nr the end he wished was eagerly accepted witness 

 Hearne ! 



Who was he, Hearne ? who was that Hearne, the sole 



