98 Appendix. 



Not having any facts in their own spheres to go on, he is 

 obliged to rest his theories on facts taken from another. 

 He deduces the sinking of the floor of the Pacific from the 

 rising of South America ; a fact which is itself only the 

 wildest of conjectures from no evidence at all : he deduces 

 ' Natural Selection ' from the results of artificial breeding, 

 results only attainable when Nature is scrupulously pre- 

 vented from having her way. And this is the logic, this 

 is the science, for which he is canonised ! 



Darwin's scientific method is, in short, nothing whatever 

 but the outrageous abuse of hypothesis : hypotheses fingere. 

 What proof is, what science is, is a question to which, like 

 other scientific idols in the nineteenth century, he could 

 have given no answer, for it is not the fashion now-a-days 

 for scientific men to meddle with * metaphysics.' The con- 

 sequence is, that instead of Science, we get, under the name 

 of Science, conjectural hypothesis ; imaginary supposition 

 of possible or even impossible agents, to whose existence 

 nothing testifies, not even the facts which they are invented 

 to explain. 



