154 CHARLES DARWIN. 



not much troubled, it was for the last time that they could 

 be said to prevail ; and thils I look upon our meeting in 

 Manchester 1861 as a crisis in the history of biology. All 

 the same, the ancient beliefs were not allowed to pass wholly 

 unchallenged ; and one thing is especially to be marked — they 

 were challenged by one who was no naturalist at all, by one 

 who was a severe thinker no less than an active worker ; one 

 who was generally right in his logic, and never wrong in his 

 instinct ; one who, though a politician, was invariably an 

 honest man — I mean the late Professor Fawcett. On this 

 occasion he brought the clearness of his mental vision to bear 

 upon Mr. Darwin's theory, with the result that Mr. Darwin's 

 method of investigation was shewn to be strictly in accordance 

 with the rules of deductive philosophy, and to throw light 

 where all was dark before." 



Professor Newton specially alluded to this in- 

 teresting case of Professor Fawcett as illustrating his 

 conviction that the theory of natural selection — 



"did not, except in one small point, require a naturalist to 

 think it out and establish its truth. . . . But in order to see 

 the effect of this principle upon organic life the knowledge— 

 the peculiar knowledge— of the naturalist was required. This 

 was the knowledge of those slight variations which are found 

 in all groups of animals and plants. . . . Herein lay the 

 triumph of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace. That triumph, 

 however, was not celebrated at Manchester. The question 

 was of such magnitude as to need another year's incubation, 

 and the crucial struggle came a twelvemonth later when the 

 Association met at Cambridge. The victory of the new 

 doctrine was then declared in a way that none could doubt. I 

 have no inclination to join in the pursuit of the fugitives." 



There is reason to believe that Professor Newton's 

 impressions of the result of the celebrated meeting 

 of the British Association at Oxford in 1860 are 

 more accurate than those of the eyewitness quoted 



