DARWIN. 95 



Races and their Origin," and brought forward Darwin's 

 investigations as exemplifying that application of science to 

 which England owes her greatness, was told that it more 

 truly paralleled " the abuse of science to which a neigh- 

 bouring nation some seventy years since owed its tem- 

 porary degradation." And the professor was accused of 

 audaciously seeking to blind his audience. Samuel Wilber- 

 force, then Bishop of Oxford, was equally denunciatory in 

 The Quarterly. He hopes that " this flimsy speculation" 

 will be completely put down. " It is a dishonouring view 

 of nature. . . . Under such influences," says the courtly 

 bishop, "a man soon goes back to the marvelling stare of 

 childhood at the centaurs and hippogriffs of fancy; or, if he 

 is of a philosophic turn, he comes, like Oken, to write a 

 scheme of creation under a ' sort of inspiration,' but it is 

 the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas. 

 The whole world of nature is laid for such a man under 

 a fantastic law of glamour, and he becomes capable of 

 believing anything ; and he is able, with a continually 

 growing neglect of all the facts around him, with equal 

 confidence and equal delusion, to look back to any past 

 and to look on to any future." * 



The Saturday Review was much more moderate, by no 

 means sharing the anxiety of those who regarded evolu- 

 tionary theoriesas hostile to Christianity. The author is said 



1 The reader will thus be able to judge for himself how far 

 Darwin's " Origin of Species" gained, "from the very first outset, 

 universal respect and a fair hearing," as Mr. Grant Allen, with 

 singular forgetfulness, states ("Darwin," p. 112). The violence 

 of the attacks made upon Darwin by the majority of religious and 

 orthodox journals is well known. 



