xii Unconscious Memory 



been done by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace and their 

 admirers to the pioneering work of Buffon, Erasmus Dar- 

 win, and Lamarck. To repair this he gives a brilliant 

 exposition of what seemed to him the most valuable portion 

 of their teachings on evolution. His analysis of Buffon 's 

 true meaning, veiled by the reticences due to the conditions 

 under which he wrote, is as masterly as the English in 

 which he develops it. His sense of wounded justice ex- 

 plains the vigorous polemic which here, as in all his later 

 writings, he carries to the extreme. 



As a matter of fact, he never realised Charles Darwin's 

 utter lack of sympathetic understanding of the work of 

 his French precursors, let alone his own grandfather, 

 Erasmus. Yet this practical ignorance, which to Butler 

 was so strange as to transcend belief, was altogether 

 genuine, and easy to realise when we recall the position 

 of Natural Science in the early thirties in Darwin's student 

 days at Cambridge, and for a decade or two later. Catas- 

 tropharianism was the tenet of the day : to the last it 

 commended itself to his Professors of Botany and Geology, 

 for whom Darwin held the fervent allegiance of the Indian 

 scholar, or chela, to his guru. As Geikie has recently 

 pointed out, it was only later, when Lyell had shown that 

 the breaks in the succession of the rocks were only partial 

 and local, without involving the universal catastrophes 

 that destroyed all life and rendered fresh creations thereof 

 necessary, that any general acceptance of a descent theory 

 could be expected. We may be very sure that Darsvin 

 must have received many solemn warnings against the 

 dangerous speculations of the " French Revolutionary 

 School." He himself was far too busy at the time with 

 the reception and assimilation of new facts to be awake 

 to the deeper interest of far-reaching theories. 



It is the more unfortunate that Butler's lack of appre- 

 ciation on these points should have led to the enormous 

 proportion of bitter personal controversy that we find in 

 the remainder of his biological writings. Possibly, as 



