348 DAKWINIANISM. 



time to all animals that is, if they vary for otherwise 

 natural selection can do nothing ! " It is really only so 

 that an idiosyncratic imagination the imagination as of 

 an innocent child wanders, in like passage after like 

 passage, throughout the whole book ! 



If all these stories had been told to him all these stories 

 of supposed carnivorous quadrupeds, supposed seals, bats, 

 insects, supposed beaks of birds and tusks of elephants, 

 supposed bears and whales if all these stories had 

 been told to him, cannot we fancy that such a profane 

 genius as the late Dr. Maginn would have been apt to 

 mutter as he turned away from them " Which fully 

 accounts for the milk in the cocker nuts"? Mr. Francis 

 Darwin himself told us (see back, pp. 262, 263) how a 

 good many judges (not profane) took them Sedgwick 

 laughing, as we saw, at " assumptions which can neither be 

 proved nor disproved," the grim Carlyle snorting out, as 

 it were, " Never could read a page of it, or waste the 

 least thought upon it: wonderful to me as indicating the 

 capricious stupidity of mankind," one Acade"micien able 

 to see before him only " a mass of assertions and absolutely 

 gratuitous hypotheses, of ten evidently fallacious," another 

 similarly exclaiming, " What obscure ideas, false, puerile, 

 and out of date!" Agassiz looking upon all as "a 

 scientific mistake," " untrue in its facts " a mistake to 

 which, for Sir Wyville Thomson, " the least support was 

 refused," and which, to Sir John Herschel, was only 

 "higgledy-piggledy!" 1 



1 It is surprising to me how many excellent intellects are still 

 fascinated by these stories. It is as ripe a scholar as I know that 

 writes thus: "Cats and red clover might seem to have no more 

 logical connection than Tenterden steeple and Goodwin Sands ; but 

 Mr. Darwin has shown how the nourishing of red clover depends on 

 the nourishing of cats, who eat the field-mice, who eat the humble- 

 bees, who fertilise the red clover." Now here is a scries quite as 

 striking as any algebraic one, and what if, in ultimate instance, it be 



