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NA TURE 



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excused for entering upon these personal details, as I give them 

 to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a conclusion." 

 — "Origin of Species," p. i, ed. 1859. 



What could more completely throw us off the scent of the 

 earlier evolutionists, or more distinctly imply that the whole 

 theory of evolution that follows was an original growth in Mr. 

 Darwin's own mind? 



Mr. Romanes implies that I imagine Mr. Darwin to have 

 "entered into a foul con^piracy with Dr. Krause, the editor of 

 Kosmos" as against my book "Evolution, Old and New," and 

 later on he supposes me to believe that I have discovered what 

 he call?, in a style of English peculiar to our leading scientists, 

 an "erroneous conspiracy." The idea of any conspiracy at all 

 never entered my mind, and there is not a word in " Unconscious 

 Memory " which will warrant Mr. Romanes' imputation. A 

 man may make a cat's paw of another without entering into a 

 conspiracy with him. 



Later on Mr. Romanes says that I published " Evolution, Old 

 and Ne\\'," "in the hope of gaining some notoriety by deserving, 

 and perhaps receiving, a contemptuous refutation " from Mr. 

 Darnin. I will not characterise this accusation in the terms 

 which it merits. 



I turn now to Dr. Krause's letter, and take its paragraphs 

 in order. 



1. Dr. Krause implies that the knowledge of what I was 

 doing could have had nothing to do with Mr. Darwin's desire to 

 bring out a translation of his (Dr. Krause's) essay, inasmuch as 

 Mr. Darwin informed him of his desire to have the essay trans- 

 lated "more than two months prior to the publication of" 

 my book, " Evolution, Old and New." This, I have no doubt, 

 is true, but it does not make against the assumption which I 

 made in "Unconscious Memory," for "Evolution, Old and 

 New," was announcid fully ten weeks before it was published. 

 It was first announced on February 22, 1S79, as a'oout to contain 

 "copious extracts" from the works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin and 

 a comparison of his theory with that of his grandson, Mr. Charles 

 Darwin. This announcement would show Mr. Darwin very 

 plainly what my book was likely to contain ; but Dr. Krause dnes 

 not say that Mr. Darwin wrote to him before Februai-y 22, 1879 

 — presumably because he cannot do so. I assumed that Mr. 

 Darwin wrote sonii- where about March i, which would still be 

 " more than two monlhs before " the publication of " Evolution, 

 Old and New." 



2. Dr. Krause says I assume that " Mr. Darwin had urged him 

 to insert an underhand attack upon him (Mr. Butler)." I did 

 not assume this ; I did not believe it ; I have not said anything 

 that can be constrned to this effect. I said that Dr. Krause's 

 concluding sentence was an attack upon me ; Dr. Krause admits 

 this. I said that under the circumstances" of Mr. Darwin's 

 preface (which distinctly precluded the reader from believing 

 that it could be meant for me) the attack was not an open, but a 

 covert one ; that it was spurious — not what through ]Mr. Dar- 

 win's preface it professed to be ; that it was antedated ; that it 

 was therefore a spurious and covert attack upon an opponent 

 interpolated into a revised edition, the revision of which had been 

 concealed. This was what I said, but it is what neither Mr. 

 Romanes nor Dr. Krause venture to deny. I neither thought 

 nor implied that Mr. D.arwin asked Dr. Krause to write the 

 attack. This would not be at all in Mr. Darwin's manner. 



3. Dr. Krause does not deny that he had my book before him 

 when he was amending his article. He admits having taken a 

 passage from it without acknowledgment. He calls a page and 

 a half " a remark," I call it " a passage." He says he did not 

 take a second passage. I did not say he had ; I only said the 

 second passage was "presumably" taken from my book, 

 whereas the first "certainly" was so. The presumption was 

 strong, for the passage in question was not in Dr. Krause's 

 original article ; it was in my book, which Dr. Krause admits to 

 h.ive had before him when amending his article, and it came 

 out in the amended .article ; but if Dr Krau-e says it is merely a 

 coincidence, of course there is an end of the matter. 



4. Dr. Krause, taking up the cudgels for Mr. Darwin, does 

 not indeed deny the allegations I have made as to the covertness, 

 and spuriousness, and antedating of the attack upnn myself, but 

 contends that "this is not due to design, but is simply the result 

 of an oversight" ; he is good enough to add that this oversight 

 "could only be most agreeable" to myself. When I am not in 

 the wrung I prefer my friends to keep as closely ns they can to 

 the facts, and to leave it to me to judge whether a modification 

 of them would be "most agreeable" to me or no. What, I 

 wonder, does Dr. Krause mean by oversight ? Does he mean 



that Mr. Darwin did not know the conclusion of Dr. Krause's 

 essay to be an attack u|>on myself? Dr. Krause says, " To every 

 reader posted up in the subject this could not be doubtful," 

 meaning, I suppose, that no one could doubt that I was '.he 

 person aimed at. Does he mean to say Mr. Darwin did not 

 know he was giving a revised article as an unrevised one? 

 Does he mean that Mr. Darwin did not know he was saying 

 what was not true when he said that my book appeared sub- 

 sequently to what he was then giving to the public? Does he 

 pretend that Mr. Darwin's case was not made apparently better 

 and mine worse by the supposed oversight? If the contention 

 of oversight is possible, surely Mr. Darwin would make it 

 himself, and surely also he would have made it earher? 

 Granting for a moment that an author of Mr. Darwin's 

 experience could be guilty of such an oversight, why did he 

 not when it was first pointed out, more than twelve monlhs 

 since, take one of the many and easy means at his disposal 

 of repairing in public the injury he had publicly inflicted? If he 

 had done this he would have heard no more about the matter 

 from me. As it was, he evaded my gravamen, and the only 

 step he even proposed to take was made contingent upon a 

 reprint of his book being called for. As a matter of fact a 

 reprint has not been called for. Mr. Darwin's only excuse for 

 what he had done, in his letter to myself, was that it was "so 

 common a practice " for an author to take an opportunity of 

 revising his work that "it never occurred " to him to state that 

 Dr. Krause's article had been modified. It is doubtless a common 

 practice for authors to revise their work, but it is not common 

 when an attack upon an opponent is know'n to have been inter- 

 polated into a revised edition the revision of which is concealed, 

 to state with every circumstance of di-tinctness that the attack 

 was published prior to the work which it attacked. 



To conclude : I suppose Mr. Romanes will maintain me to be 

 so unimportant a person that Mr. Darw-in has no call to bear in 

 mind the fir.-t principles of fair play where I am concerned, just 

 as we need keep no faith with the lower animals. If Mr. Darwin 

 chooses to take this ground, and does not mind going on selling 

 a book which contains a grave inaccuracy, advantageous to him- 

 self and prejudicial to another writer, without taking any steps 

 to correct it, he is welcome to do so as far tis I am concerned — 

 he hurts himself more than he hurts me. But there is another 

 aspect of the matter to which I am less indifferent: I refer to its 

 bearing upor. the standard of good faith and gentlemanly conduct 

 which should prevail among Englishmen — and perhaps among 

 Germans too. I maintain that Mr. Darwin's recent action and 

 that of those who, like Mr. Romanes, defend it, has a lowering 

 effect upon this standard. S. Butler 



Geological Climates 



When a reader of the intelligence of Mr. Wallace misunder- 

 stands my words it becomes jilain to me they have failed to 

 convey my meaning. 1 do not accept the interpretation he has 

 put upon them, nor do I admit that even that interpretation 

 would tell so much in favour of his theory as he supposes. 



As howiver I agree with him that the question is far too 

 large to be fully discussed in your columns, I shall allow the 

 controversy, so far as I am concerned, to terminate, and shall 

 publish my detailed views on geological climate in another 

 way. Samuel Haughton 



Trinity College, Dublin, January 27 



On the Spectrum of Carbon 

 In the discussions on the specrum of carbon which have 

 recently appeared in your journal much stress is laid on the 

 ioipossibility of volatilising that snbstance by any heat which 

 man can produce. I think this assumption is not warranted^by 

 experience. Two or three facts in Despretz' account of a 

 remarkable set of exi eriments which he made about thirty years 

 ago, seem to me to show it to be unfounded. This is given in 

 the Comptc! rcndus, vol. xxviii. He exposed rods of anthracite 

 to the action of 125 Bunsens (zincs 5j in. high) and also to the 

 solar focus of an annular lens 36 in. diameter. The rods bent 

 under the combined action, and even appeared to fuse! In vol. 

 xxix. he describes experiments with rods of sugar-charcoal under 

 a battery of 500 similar cells. The electric egg was covered 

 suddenly with a hard block cry-talline powder. 



He thinks attempts to fuse carbon should be made in condensed 

 nitrogen and in metallic vessels. In the same volume he says 

 that with 600 cells rods of sugar charcoal bend— swell at the 



