et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 49 



speculations, nevertheless on a les defauts 

 de ses qualites, and his book has two solid 

 claims on the esteem of posterity. Cham- 

 bers was the first writer, not only in Eng- 

 land, but in the world, to gather up the 

 scattered rays of science and speculation 

 nebular hypothesis, geology, ethnology and 

 announce that they converged to a point, 

 which he called Development, the upward 

 march from low to high. Moreover, Cham- 

 bers' notion of evolution was truer than 

 Darwin's : it recognises what Darwin dog- 

 matically denies the organic power of Na- 

 ture. For Chambers, perceiving the fact of 



development, but not caricaturing it, in- 



i 



vented no theories : whereas Darwin owed 

 his reputation to a fiction that transmogrifies 

 the truth into error. Hypotheses non fingo was 

 not the motto of Darwin. He supplanted 

 Chambers by grafting on the certainty geo- 

 logical development a figment. According 



