200 DARWINIANISM. 



ingenuity any cross may invite": he can parry in carte, 

 and equally in tierce. As he says himself, he could have 

 written " a more damning review " of his own book " than 

 has yet appeared." The wily ingenuity of the arch little 

 rogue that painted the polyanthuses and feigned the stolen 

 fruit has not died out in the man ; neither, respectively, 

 has the motive. What the boy did " was always done 

 for the sake of causing excitement ; " and Mr. Darwin 

 had, in the success of his very peculiar doctrine, always 

 something like excitement in his eye. If what was said 

 of it by others first stirred the waters ; still it was in 

 what these others had to say of it that the reason lay. 

 As we have seen, Mr. Darwin again and again puts force 

 on what agriculturally, horticulturally, and how not, he 

 had learned from others ; and Sir Charles Lyell had no 

 business to ascribe all this, important as it is, to twenty 

 years of original research. Still it was in that special 

 important outcome, come as it may, that the focus of 

 the excitement that was to be lay. That creation had 

 nothing whatever to do with the life of a single being 

 on the earth, animal or plant, and that some years 

 earlier, we ourselves men themselves demonstrably 

 had been co-descendants of or with monkeys ! Can we 

 wonder that such extraordinary (so-called) discoveries as 

 these, authenticated by the most authoritative judges 

 then existent, an Alfred Russell Wallace, a Dr. Asa 

 Gray, a William Benjamin Carpenter, C.B., M.D., LL.D., 

 F.R.S., F.L.S., F.G.S., a Sir Joseph Hooker, a Sir Charles 

 Lyell, a Huxley discoveries bearing, moreover, in a 

 manner the most crucially and cruelly critical, on the 

 nearest, the dearest, the most vital and essential interests 

 of mankind, both here and hereafter can we wonder, I 

 say, that such discoveries, so situated, and so authentic- 

 ated, were received with just one rush, respectively, of 

 astonishment, of gratification, of abomination, 011 



