Mr. Darwin and '^ Evolution," etc. 45 



of February 1879. Soon afterwards arrangements were 

 made for a translation of Dr. Krause's essay, and were 

 completed by the end of April. Then my book came out, 

 and in some way or other Dr. Krause happened to get hold 

 of it. He helped himself — not to much, but to enough ; 

 made what other additions to and omissions from his 

 article he thought would best meet " Evolution, Old and 

 New," and then fell to condemning that book in a finale 

 that was meant to be crushing. Nothing was said about 

 the revision which Dr. Krause's work had undergone, but 

 it was expressly and particularly declared in the preface 

 that the English translation was an accurate version of 

 what appeared in the February number of Kosmos, and 

 no less expressly and particularly stated that my book 

 was published subsequently to this. Both these state- 

 ments are untrue ; they are in Mr. Darwin's favour and 

 prejudicial to myself. 



All this was done with that well-known " happy sim- 

 plicity " of which the Pall Mall Gazette, December 12, 

 1879, declared that Mr. Darwin was " a master." The 

 final sentence, about the " weakness of thought and mental 

 anachronism which no one can envy," was especially 

 successful. The reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette just 

 quoted from gave it in full, and said that it was thoroughly 

 justified. He then mused forth a general gnome that the 

 " confidence of writers who deal in semi-scientific para- 

 doxes is commonly in inverse proportion to their grasp of 

 the subject." Again my vanity suggested to me that I 

 was the person for whose benefit this gnome was intended. 

 My vanity, indeed, was well fed by the whole transaction ; 

 for I saw that not only did Mr. Darwin, who should be the 

 best judge, think my work worth notice, but that he did 

 not venture to meet it openly. As for Dr. Krause's con- 

 cluding sentence, I thought that when a sentence had 

 been antedated, the less it contained about anachronism 

 the better. 



Only one of the reviews that I saw of Mr. Darwin's 



