278 ON THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY x 



the rudiments of Greek grammar. And yet, before 

 giving positive opinions about these high ques- 

 tions of Biology, people not only do not seem 

 to think it necessary to be acquainted with 

 the grammar of the subject, but they have not 

 even mastered the alphabet. You find criticism 

 and denunciation showered about by persons who 

 not only have not attempted to go through the 

 discipline necessary to enable them to be judges, 

 but who have not even reached that stage of emer- 

 gence from ignorance in which the knowledge 

 that such a discipline is necessary dawns upon the 

 mind. I have had to watch with some atten- 

 tion in fact I have been favoured with a good 

 deal of it myself the sort of criticism with which 

 biologists and biological teachings are visited. 

 I am told every now and then that there is a 

 " brilliant article " l in so-and-so, in which we are 

 all demolished. I used to read these things once, 

 but I am getting old now, and I have ceased to 

 attend very much to this cry of " wolf." When 

 one does read any of these productions, what one 

 finds generally, on the face of it is, that the 

 brilliant critic is devoid of even the elements of 

 biological knowledge, and that his brilliancy is like 



1 Galileo was troubled bj r a sort of people whom he called 

 "paper philosophers," because they fancied that the true read- 

 ing of nature was to be detected by the collation of texts. The 

 race is not extinct, but, as of old, brings forth its " winds of 

 doctrine " by which the weathercock heads among us are much 

 exercised. 



