Per Contra 24.7 
does its success become. It seems as if some organisms 
can do anything with anything. Beethoven picked his 
teeth with the snuffers, and seems to have picked them 
sufficiently to his satisfaction. So Mr. Darwin with one of 
the worst styles imaginable did all that the clearest, 
tersest writer could have done. Strange, that such a master 
of cunning (in the sense of my title) should have been the 
apostle of luck, and one so terribly unlucky as Lamarck, 
of cunning, but such is the irony of nature. Buffon planted, 
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. 
Darwin who said, “ That fruit is ripe,” and shook it 
into his lap. 
With this Mr. Darwin’s best friends ought to be content ; 
his admirers are not well advised in representing him as 
endowed with all sorts of qualities which he was very far 
from possessing. Thus it is pretended that he was one of 
those men who were ever on the watch for new ideas, ever 
ready to give a helping hand to those who were trying to 
advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake 
and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required 
them at his hands. No conception can be more wantonly 
inexact. I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once 
incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was “ ever 
ready,” &c. So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor 
people’s feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but 
it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly cere- 
mony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are in 
the habit of washing poor people’s feet. I can understand 
Mr. Darwin’s not having taken any public notice, for 
example, of “ Life and Habit,”’ for though I did not attack 
him in force in that book, it was abundantly clear that an 
attack could not be long delayed, and a man may be par- 
doned for not doing anything to advertise the works of his 
opponents ; but there is no excuse for his never having 
referred to Professor Hering’s work either in “‘ Nature,” 
when Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to it 
