How Theories are Mamtfactured 93 



with all due deference to a passed master of the craft, it 

 may be asked whether he himself has in this instance 

 quite understood the action of Natural Selection. The 

 question is not what the birds think, but what nature 

 does : not of a coroner's inquest, but of the survival of 

 the fittest. Naturally the birds which gobble down 

 poison for food will die, and as a necessary consequence 

 will have no more children ; while those they have al- 

 ready had, if they imitate their parents, will perish like 

 them, and bring their race to naught : or if they do not 

 imitate their parents, will produce a new and circum- 

 spect generation, in face of which the malign vegetable 

 will, like the Moor of Venice, find its occupation gone. 

 To argue according to the model we have already seen : 

 it is impossible that a bird should not suffer by a habit 

 of eating poison, and some birds must necessarily have 

 been exterminated by their treacherous entertainers. 



The plain fact is that the whole thing is too absurd 

 for serious discussion, were it not that so large a number 

 of readers would appear to take such histories for serious 

 contributions to science. The writer with whom I have 

 been engaged produces book after book and article after 

 article, in a fashion which bears witness to his popularity: 

 he is enthusiastically praised by such men as Mr. Clodd, 1 

 and if report speaks truly, patronized by Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer : he is chosen to write the sketch of Darwin in 

 the English Worthies series, and there he proclaims, as 

 he everywhere indicates, his championship of the crudest 

 and baldest materialism, and his devotion to the creed 

 of " evolution as a cosmical process, one and continuous 

 from nebula to man, from star to soul, from atom to 

 society." 2 In view of all this it becomes imperative to 

 examine thoroughly the real claim of his works to the 

 position they affect to fill. 



But it is not only in this fatal facility of imagining, 



1 " As Grant Allen shows in his delightful and exhaustive book 

 on the colour sense," &c. &c. &c. (Clodd, Story of Creation^ 

 p. 90). 



2 English Worthies : Darwin, p. 191. 



