262 DAKWINIANISM. 



style : ' You have just reproduced Lamarck's doctrine, 

 aud nothing else, and here Lyell and others have been 

 attacking him for twenty years, and because you say the 

 very same thing, they are all coming round ; it is the 

 most ridiculous inconsistency,' " etc. And both of you, 

 he might have added, only tell stories to children, like 

 the Sophists in Plato (fjuvOov riva eVacrro? Oaiverai fj-oi 

 iraialv a>? ovviv ^^Iv, Soph. 242). 1 



1 That Mr. Francis Darwin should admit so freely adversaria in 

 his volumes, is very admirable on his part ; nor if it is through 

 confidence in his position, will that detract from his fairness. He 

 allows Sedgwick publicly to tell his father, "Many of your wide 

 conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be 

 proved nor disproved parts of the book I laughed at till my sides 

 were almost sore." We have seen already, by favour of note or text, 

 what was said by Pictet and by Haughton of Dublin. He has no 

 hesitation in letting us know that the partiality of such intimate 

 friends as Henslow and Jenyns (Bloomfield) only " goes the length 

 of imagining that many of the smaller groups both of animals and 

 plants may at some remote period have had a common parentage," 

 and is not equal to say that " the whole of the theory cannot be 

 true, but that it is very far from being proved ; and doubts its ever 

 being possible to prove it." Sir John Herschel characterised the 

 proposition of the Origin as " the law of higgledy-piggledy ; " we 

 are told that Mr. Darwin felt this as "evidently very contemptuous," 

 and as "a great blow and discouragement." We are allowed to 

 know also (ii. 39) that " Owen is vehemently opposed to any muta- 

 bility in species." We did not need to hear, but we do hear, of 

 how Agassiz "considered the transmutation theory a scientific 

 mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method," and how 

 its arguments "made not the slightest impression " on his mind. 

 We do not wonder that the extravagant exclamations of the dis- 

 tinguished French naturalist Flourens are quoted with silent 

 contempt : "Que d'idees obscures, que d'idees fausses ! Quel jargon 

 metaphysique jete mal & propos dans 1'histoire naturelle ! Quelles 

 personnifi cations pueriles et surannees ! " As Mr. Darwin at last 

 was elected to the French Institute too, we are not surprised to be 

 allowed to read (iii. 224) that its doors had been long kept closed to 

 him because the science of his chief books was "not science, but a 

 mass of assertions and absolutely gratuitous hypotheses." We must, 



