MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE THEORY. 151 



I opened the title-page, and found upon it the signa- 

 ture " W. S. Macleay " ; it must have been the very 

 volume given him by Robert Lowe, which Macleay 

 had read and believed he had been fairly criticising. 

 Out of Macleay's volume, therefore, I quote the 

 sentences he referred to in his letter. 



Darwin's real statement about the black bear 

 which " became a whale " is to be found on page 184 : 



"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne 

 swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, 

 like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case 

 as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better 

 adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I 

 can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by 

 natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure 

 and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature 

 was produced as monstrous as a whale." 



The statement about the gills which " dropped off 

 by want of use " becomes in the original (p. 191) : 



"In the higher vertebrata the branchiae have wholly 

 disappeared the slits on the sides of the neck and the loop- 

 like course of the arteries still marking in the embryo their 

 former position." 



Although the hypothetical case of the black 

 bear carefully guarded as it is does not now appear 

 to us at all extravagant (indeed, in the cleft cheeks 

 of the goat-sucker we have a precisely analogous case), 

 Darwin seems to have thought it unsuitable, probably 

 because it became an easy butt for ignorant ridicule. 

 We find accordingly that in the second and all sub- 

 sequent editions everything after the word " water " is 



