EVOLUTION 37 



In other words, it is only the active worker — the original 

 investigator — ^who, by personal appeal to Nature through 

 artificially imposed conditions, i.e. experiment, or through 

 observation, i.e. ready-made phenomena, has come to 

 understand fully what a fact really means in the scientific 

 sense ; to realize how laborious is the process of wooing 

 truth and how ambiguous are the answers often given by 

 Nature to his cross-examinations. I have elsewhere 

 recorded a humorous rejoinder by Darwin ^ on one of the 

 very few occasions when it was my never-forgotten privi- 

 lege to have met him ; as this reply bears so closely upon 

 the present topic I wiU venture to repeat it. I had 

 been dweying upon this very point of the difiiculty of 

 getting Nature to give a definite answer to a simple 

 question, when, with one of those mirthful flashes that 

 occasionally lighted up his features, he retorted : ' She 

 will tell you a direct lie if she can.' 



Judged by the standard of the scientific expert it is 

 obvious that Spencer could not have been expected to 

 influence the scientific world to the same extent as 

 Darwin, for his achievements as an original investigator 

 I shrink into insignificance when compared with those of 

 his illustrious contemporary. As Professor Bourne has 

 well put it in last year's Herbert Spencer Lecture, it 

 would have been practically impossible for the author of 

 a system of philosophy based upon unified science to have 

 become an investigator in every department of science. 

 If an expert in any sense he was a biologist, and his 

 position as such has been fairly stated by Professor 

 Bourne. But although he was not constantly in direct 

 commune with Nature, as was Darwin, it cannot fairly 

 be said that he was not an investigator at all. 



There certainly has been a tendency of late years to 

 do injustice to Spender in this respect. I am afraid that 

 we of the later generations are rather too apt to minimize 

 the work of our predecessors, upon whose shoulders we 



' Presidential address to the Entomological Society of London, 

 Transactions, 1896. 



