342 



NA 1 URE 



[Fed. 9, 1 888 



interest. If the higher class of workers in Ireland took 

 the trouble to study systematically the objects here so 

 carefully described, an epoch might be marked in the 

 development of Irish technical skill. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions 

 expressed by his correspondents. Neither can he under- 

 take to return, or to correspond with the writers of, 

 rejected manuscripts. No notice is taken of anonymous 

 communications. 



[The Editor U7-gently requests correspondents to keep their 

 letters as short as possible. The pressure on his space 

 is so great that it is impossible othenvise to insure the 

 appearance even of communications containing interesting 

 and novel facts. 



The Duke of Argyll's Charges against Men of Science. 



The Duke of Argyll's singular appetite for besmirching the 

 characters of men of science appears to grow by w hat it feeds 

 on ; and, as fast as old misrepresentations are refuted, new ones 

 are evolved out of the inexhaustible inaccuracy of his Grace's 

 imagination. 



In the last two letters which the Duke of Argyll has addressed 

 to you, he accuses me of having charged the members of the 

 French Institute with having entered into a " conspiracy of 

 silence " in respect of Mr. Darwin's views. I desire to say that 

 the assertion that I have done anything of the kind is untrue 

 and devoid of foundation. 



My words, in the passage of which the Duke has cited as much 

 as suited his purpose, stand as follows: "In France, the in- 

 fluence of Elie de Beaumont and of Flourens — the former of 

 whom is said to have 'damned himself to everlasting fame' by 

 inventing the nicknr.me of ' la science moussante ' for evolu- 

 tionism — to say nothing of the ill-will of other powerful members 

 of the Institute, produced, for a long time,the effect of a conspiracy of 

 silence."^ I used the words I have italicized advisedly, for the 

 purpose of indicating that, though the members of the Institute 

 did not enter into a conspiracy of silence, the notorious 

 antagonism of some of them to evolution produced much the 

 same result as if they had done so. 



If the Duke of Argyll were properly informed upon the topics 

 about which he ventures to speak so rashly, he would know that 

 M. Flourens wrote a book in vehement denunciation of evolu- 

 tionism. As I reviewed that book not very long after its ap- 

 pearance, I could not well be ignorant of its existence. And 

 being aware of its existence, I could not possibly have charged 

 M. Flourens with taking any part in a " conspiracy of silence." 



The "effect" of the known repugnance to Mr. Darwin's 

 views of some of the most prominent members of the Institute, 

 to which I refer, is the effect upon the younger generation of 

 French naturalists. Considering the influence of the Institute 

 upon scientific appointments, the chances of a candidate known 

 to be an evolutionist would have been small indeed ; and 

 prudence dictated silence. 



Mr. Carlyle has celebrated the courag?, if not the discretion, 

 of a certain " Rex Sigismundus," who, his Latin being called in 

 question, declared that he was, as a Royal personage, "supra 

 grammaticam." The Duke of Argyll appears to be of King 

 Sigismund's opinion in respect of the obligations which are felt 

 by humbler persons, who have, wittingly or unwittingly, accused 

 their fellows wrongfully ; and I do not suppose that he will 

 descend, on my account, from a position which may be sublime 

 or may be ridiculous, according to one's point of view. The 

 readers of Nature will choose their own. 



T. H. Huxley. 



Bournemouth, February 4. 



' " Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," vol. ii. pp. 185-85. 



An Explanation. 



Since the Duke of Argyll's references to myself have been 

 interpreted in a manner likely to convey an erroneous impression . 

 to the readers of Nature, it seems to me to be now necessary to 

 give some explanation of the facts in which I am concerned. I 

 intend, however, to go no further than to establish the position 

 his Grace has taken up as regards myself Such a step, savour- 

 ing somewhat of presumption on my part, would not have been 

 taken if Prof. Judd had admitted that, although no paper of mine 

 was ever before the Council of the Geological Society, an offer to 

 present such a paper was, doubtless for sufficient reasons, at once 

 declined. 



In the spring of 1885, by the advice of Mr. Murray, who had 

 been for some time engaged in examining my recent geological 

 collections from the Solomon Islands, I offered to Prof. Judd, 

 then Secretary of the Geological Society, to present my observa- 

 tions on the upraised coral-reef formations in th2 form of a 

 paper, in which, as I slated, Mr. Darwin's theory of coral reefs 

 would be brought under consideration. This-ofFer being declined, 

 my observations were taken up by Mr. Murray and were pub- 

 lished in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for 

 1885. As I saw too plainly that the new view of the origin of coral 

 reefs was very far from being generally accepted, I deemed it 

 advisable in preparing my paper to draw no inferences and to 

 allow the facts to speak for themselves. However, f-ix months 

 after the reading of the paper, whilst going over the proofs, 

 having been assured that the theory of Mr. Darwin was rapidly 

 losing ground, I appended some remarks in which I gave the 

 general bearing of my discoveries. 



Had I harboured a desire in my mind to record any dis- 

 appointment in connection with the appreciation of my work, I 

 might have done so in the preface of my small geological volume 

 recently published. The reflection that I had succeeded, and 

 that Mr. Murray's views, as I was told, were being generally 

 received, gave me ample grounds for satisfaction ; and there was 

 therefore no reason why 1 should refer to any difficulties of a 

 personal character. I must confess, howeve--, I was afterwards 

 deeply disappointed on finding that, although the nature of my 

 discoveries was first announced in the columns of this journal in 

 January 1884, whilst the observations theu selves had been nearly 

 two years before the world, my name and work were studiously 

 ignored in the recent controversy by those who spoke on behalf 

 of English men of science, and particularly on behalf of the 

 Geological Society. Naturally it was there that I looked most 

 for approval. I soon perceived, however, that it could not be in 

 the want of publicity that the reason lay, nor even in the in- 

 sufficient lapse of time since the publication of my papers. Long 

 abstracts were given in the columns of this journal of the principal 

 paper (Trans. Ed. Roy. Soc, 1885), and of a paper also read 

 before the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Proc, 1886). At the 

 beginning of 1885 (or perhaps earlier) I sent to Prof Judd a 

 blue pamphlet published in New Zealand, in which I briefly 

 described the discoveries I had made up to the end of 1883. 

 At the beginning of 1886 I sent to him my principal Edinburgh 

 paper of the previous year. 



It then occurred to me that since Prof Dana's last paper, of 

 September 1885, was the chief rallying point of the opponents 

 of Mr. Murray's views, the cue in estimating the value of my 

 work might have been thence derived. I found, however, that 

 Prof. Dana had only before him, when referring to my dis- 

 coveries, an extract from a private letter of mine t<) Mr. Murray 

 written in the midst of my work, and published in Nature in 

 January 1884. Rightly enough, he did not consider such a 

 brief account as at ail conclusive. My published observations 

 had yet to come before him. It was not, therefore, from the 

 other side of the Atlantic that in estimating the value of my 

 observations Mr. Murray's opponents had taken their cue. 



I was forced, therefore, to the conclusion that the reason lay 

 rather in the competency than in the bearing of my observations. 

 I could find no other explanation of the fact that in the succes- 

 s-ion of replies to the Duke of Argyll's article, entitled "A 

 Great Lesson," no reference whatever was made to the recent 

 important evidence I had adduced — evidence of which at least 

 one of the writers had been previously aware during a period of 

 two if not three years. Under these circumstances, I accei ted 

 the decision which the lapse of nearly three years had not 

 afTected ; and, having naturally some degree of sensitiveness, I 

 withdrew from the Geological Society.^ 



' Mr. Guppy was induced afterwards to withdraw his resignation. — Ed. 



Nature. 



