Criticism in the Quarterly 1 1 7 



the authorship of it became known to Darwin's friends. 

 In connection with this, Huxley wrote in 1887, in Dar- 

 win'' s Life and Letters : 



" I doubt if there was any man then living who had a better 

 right (than Darwin) to expect that anything he might choose 

 to say on such a question as the Origin of Species would be 

 listened to with profound attention, and discussed with respect. 

 And there was certainly no man whose personal character 

 should have afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct 

 with malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences. Yet 

 such was the portion of one of the kindest and truest men that 

 it was ever my good fortune to know ; and years had to pass 

 away before misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation 

 ceased to be the most notable constituents of the majority of 

 the multitudinous criticisms of his work which poured from 

 the press. I am loth to rake up any of these ancient scandals 

 from their well-deserved oblivion ; but I must make good a 

 statement which may seem overcharged to the present genera- 

 tion, and there is no piece justificative more apt for the purpose 

 or more worthy of such dishonour than the article in the 

 Quarterty Revieiv for July, i860. Since Lord Brougham as- 

 sailed Dr. Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the 

 insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this 

 remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of 

 observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of ex- 

 positors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a 

 ' flighty ' person who endeavours to ' prop up his utterly rotten 

 fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose ' mode of dealing 

 with nature ' is reprobated as ' utterly dishonourable to natural 

 science.' And all this high and mighty talk, which would 

 have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds 

 from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or 

 of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr, Dar- 

 win's views, he can ask, 'Is it credible that all favourable 

 varieties of turnips are tending to become men ' ; who is so 

 ignorant of palaeontology that he can talk of the ' flowers 

 and fruits' of the plants of the carboniferous epoch; of com- 

 parative anatomy, that he can gravely aflfirm the poison ap- 

 paratus of venomous snakes to be ' entirely separate from the 



