i87l "MR. DARWIN'S CRITICS" 391 



ing, and now his arms went black and blue under the mus- 

 cular strain, as if they had been bruised. 



But the holiday was by no means spent entirely in 

 recreation. One week was devoted to the British Associa- 

 tion ; another to the examination of some interesting fossils 

 at Elgin ; while the last three weeks were occupied in 

 writing two long articles, " Mr. Darwin's Critics," and the 

 address entitled " Administrative Nihilism " referred to 

 above (p. 384), as well as a review of Dana's Crinoids. The 

 former, which appeared in the Contemporary Review for 

 November (Coll. Ess. ii. 120-187) was a review of (i) Con- 

 tributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, by A. R. Wal- 

 lace, (2) The Genesis of Spceies, by St. George Mivart, 

 F.R.S., and (3) an article in the Quarterly for July 1871, on 

 Darwin's Deseent of Man. 



" I am Darwin's bull-dog," he once said, and the Quar- 

 terly Reviewer's treatment of Darwin, " alike unjust and un- 

 becoming," provoked him into immediate action. " I am 

 about sending you," he writes to Haeckel on Nov. 2, " a 

 little review of some of Darwin's critics. The dogs have 

 been barking at his heels too much of late." Apart from 

 this stricture, however, he notes the " happy change " which 

 " has come over Mr. Darwin's critics. The mixture of ig- 

 norance and insolence which at first characterised a large 

 proportion of the attacks with which he was assailed, is no 

 longer the sad distinction of anti-Darwinian criticism." 

 Notes too " that, in a dozen years, the Origin of Species has 

 worked as complete a revolution in biological science as the 

 Prineipia did in astronomy — and it has done so, because, 

 in the words of Helmholtz, it contains an ' essentially new 

 creative thought.' " 



The essay is particularly interesting as giving evidence 

 of his skill and knowledge in dealing with psychology, as 

 against the Quarterly Reviewer, and even with such an un- 

 likely subject as scholastic metaphysics, so that, by an odd 

 turn of events, he appeared in the novel character of a 

 defender of Catholic orthodoxy against an attempt from 

 within that Church to prove that its teachings have in reality 

 always been in harmony with the requirements of modern 

 26 



