MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE THEORY. 151 



I opened the title-page, and found upon it the signa- 

 ture " W. S. Macleay " ; it must have been the very 

 vokime given him by Robert Lowe, which Macleay 

 had read and believed he had been fairly criticising. 

 Out of Macleay's volume, therefore, I quote the 

 sentences he referred to in his letter. 



Darwin's real statement about the black bear 

 which " became a whale " is to be found on page 184 : — 



"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne 

 swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, 

 like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case 

 as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better 

 adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I 

 can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by 

 natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure 

 and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature 

 was produced as monstrous as a whale." 



The statement about the gills which " dropped off 

 by want of use " becomes in the original (p. 191) : — 



"In the higher vertebrata the branchiae have wholly 

 disappeared — the slits on the sides of the neck and the loop- 

 like course of the arteries still marking in the embryo their 

 former position." 



Although the hypothetical case of the black 

 bear — carefully guarded as it is — does not now appear 

 to us at all extravagant (indeed, in the cleft cheeks 

 of the goat-sucker we have a precisely analogous case), 

 Darwin seems to have thought it unsuitable, probably 

 because it became an easy butt for ignorant ridicule. 

 We find accordingly that in the second and all sub- 

 sequent editions everything after the word " water " is 



