WHAT CONDITIONED THE WORK AND ITS SUCCESS. 197 



arouse public attention." It is quite clear to him that 

 he who fails to impress his readers, should fail ; while he 

 " who succeeds in doing so deserves," he says, " in my 

 opinion, all the credit." It was " a golden rule " with 

 him, he tells his children (i. 87), if any contrariety 

 offered itself to make a note of it at once : So, he goes 

 on, " very few objections were raised against my views 

 which I had not at least noticed and attempted to 

 answer." 



These last words suggest what a " wriggle " is. At 

 any time that something might be said in objection to 

 him, Mr. Darwin would at least notice and attempt to 

 answer it : Even in that, so far, is there not something 

 of the burthen of Mr. Darwin's own term " wriggle " ? 

 What wriggling is will appear from the following. Mr. 

 Darwin (iii. 309) asks Dr. Asa Gray to tell him, "Does 

 8. pcrfoliata close its flower like S. speculum, with angular 

 inward folds ? " for, " If so," he adds in the alarm of 

 compromise, " I am smashed without some fearful wrig- 

 gling." Again, when H. W. Bates seems to refer to 

 some fact apparently adverse to some certain tenet 

 of his, Mr. Darwin (ii. 361) writes to his friend 

 Hooker, " How well he (Bates) argues, and with what 

 crushing force, against the glacial doctrine. I cannot 

 wriggle out of it : I am dumbfounded, yet I cannot give 

 up equatorial cooling." It would appear thus that it is 

 only with a laugh at his own expense that Mr. Darwin 

 finds himself in a corner to wriggle; and certainly 

 the whole matter is not worth more than a laugh. 

 Another pleasant reflection of the same shift occurs in 

 a word or two that concern Mr. Herbert Spencer, whom, 

 of all men, as a philosopher, Mr. Darwin, probably, 

 respects the most. In a letter to Sir Joseph Hooker 

 (iii 55), he comically avows: " I feel rather mean when 

 I read him (Spencer). I could bear and rather enjoy 



