52 FIFTY YEAKS OF DARWINISM 



have been bitterly attacked and misrepresented 

 in the early years of the last half-century is quite 

 intelligible ; but it is difficult to understand the 

 position of a recent writer who maintains that 

 the book exercised a malignant influence upon 

 the interesting and important study of species 

 and varieties by means of hybridism. As regards 

 these researches its appearance, we are told, ' was 

 the signal for a general halt ' ; * upon them 

 Natural Selection 'descended like a numbing 

 spell' ;2 and, if we are still unsatisfied with his 

 fertiUty in metaphor, the author offers a further 

 choice between the forty years in the wilderness ^ 

 and the leading into captivity.* 



Francis Galton, in his reply as a recipient 

 of the Darwin- Wallace Medal on July 1, 1908, 

 recalled the effect of the Linnean Society Essay 

 and the Origin. The dominant feeling, he said, 

 was one of freedom.^ The liberty of which Galton 

 spoke was freely offered to every student of hy- 

 bridism, No longer brought up against the blank 

 wall of special creation, he could fearlessly follow 

 his researches into all their bearings upon the 

 evolution of species. And this had been clearly 



second and full account of his views (see pp. 6, 87j : 'I hate 

 argument from results, but on my views of descent, really Natural 

 History becomes a sublimely grand result-giving subject (now you 

 may quiz me for so foolish an escape of mouth).' — Life and Letters, 

 ii. 30. 



1 Eep. Brit. Assoc. (1904), 575. ' 1. c, p. 576. 



' Mendel's Principles of Heredity, W. Bateson (1902), 104. 



* 1. c, p. 208. 



^ Darwin-Wallace Celebration of the Linnean Society of London 

 (1908), 26. 



