190 EVOLUTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



fashion ; because they wished to obtain credit 

 for being persons of cultivated tastes ; because 

 they wished to see some "lion" of the day; 

 or from mere love of novelty, for which the 

 Athenians were always proverbial.* It would 

 be interesting to know how many among 

 ourselves really attend a scientific lecture, or 

 a fashionable church, for the sake of the os- 

 tensible object of the meeting, and how many 

 from other reasons. It would certainly not be 

 uncharitable to suppose that the Athenians 

 who attended the fashionable assemblies of the 

 period would do so from motives as multifarious 

 as those which avowedly influence ourselves on 

 similar occasions. 



No doubt, if Darwin had advertised a lecture 

 on the Origin of Species at the Crystal Palace, 

 he would have had an enormous audience, but 

 a large proportion would certainly have con- 

 sisted of persons who. were quite incompetent 

 to enter into the merits of the question, and 

 another large proportion would perhaps have 

 been quite indifferent to the subject-matter of 

 the lecture. We must not imagine that such 



*. Acts xvii, 21. 



