Mr. Darwin and '* Evolution," etc. 43 



it was not to be found in the German. I looked for the 

 piece I had quoted from Buffon about rudimentary organs ; 

 but there was notliing of it, nor indeed any reference to 

 Buffon. It was plain, therefore, that the article which 

 Mr. Darwin had given was not the one he professed to be 

 giving. I read Mr. Darwin's preface over again to see 

 whether he left himself any loophole. There was not a chink 

 or cranny through which escape was possible. The only in- 

 ference that could be drawn was either that some one had 

 imposed upon Mr. Darwin, or that Mr. Darwin, although it 

 was not possible to suppose him ignorant of the interpola- 

 tions that had been made, nor of the obvious purpose of 

 the concluding sentence, had nevertheless palmed off an 

 article which had been added to and made to attack 

 " Evolution, Old and New," as though it were the original 

 article which appeared before that book was written. I 

 could not and would not believe that Mr. Darwin had 

 condescended to this. Nevertheless, I saw it was necessary 

 to sift the whole matter, and began to compare the Ger- 

 man and the English articles paragraph by paragraph. 



On the first page I found a passage omitted from the 

 English, which with great labour I managed to get through, 

 and can now translate as follows : — 



" Alexander Von Humboldt used to take pleasure in 

 recounting how powerfully Forster's pictures of the South 

 Sea Islands and St. Pierre's illustrations of Nature had 

 provoked his ardour for travel and influenced his career as a 

 scientific investigator. How much more impressively must 

 the works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, with their reiterated fore- 

 shadowing of a more lofty interpretation of Nature, have 

 affected his grandson, who in his youth assuredly approached 

 them with the devotion due to the works of a renowned poet."^ 



I then came upon a passage common to both German 

 and English, which in its turn was followed in the English 

 by the sub-apologetic paragraph which I had been struck 

 with on first reading, and which was not in the German, 



1 Kosmos, February 1879, p. 397. 



