26 Luck, or Cunning ? 
unless led to do so by regard to the interests of theories 
which I believe to be as nearly important as any theories 
can be which do not directly involve money or bodily 
convenience. 
The second complaint against me is to the effect that I 
have made no original experiments, but have taken all my 
facts at second hand. This is true, but I do not see what 
it has to do with the question. If the facts are sound, how 
can it matter whether A or B collected them ? If Professor 
Huxley, for example, has made a series of valuable original 
observations (not that I know of his having done so), why 
am I to make them over again ? What are fact-collectors 
worth if the fact co-ordinators may not rely upon them ? 
It seems to me that no one need do more than go to the best 
sources for his facts, and tell his readers where he got them. 
If I had had occasion for more facts I daresay I should have 
taken the necessary steps to get hold of them, but there 
was no difficulty on this score ; every text-book supplied 
me with all, and more than all, I wanted ; my complaint 
was that the facts which Mr. Darwin supplied would not 
bear the construction he tried to put upon them ; I tried, 
therefore, to make them bear another which seemed at 
once more sound and more commodious; rightly or 
wrongly I set up as a builder, not as a burner of bricks, and 
the complaint so often brought against me of not having 
made experiments is about as reasonable as complaint 
against an architect on the score of his not having quarried 
with his own hands a single one of the stones which he has 
used in building. Let my opponents show that the facts 
which they and I use in common are unsound, or that I 
have misapplied them, and I will gladly learn my mistake, 
but this has hardly, to my knowledge, been attempted. 
To me it seems that the chief difference between myself 
and some of my opponents lies in this, that I take my facts 
from them with acknowledgment, and they take their 
theories from me—without. 
