6 Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society. 
the people from the Egypt of “special creation” into the 
promised land flowing with evolutionary milk and honey. 
Darwin deserves all praise, it is true, for his remarkable 
generalization, but it must be remembered that his theory 
has not proved to be the miracle of induction which it was 
once thought to be. Furthermore, Wallace should share 
with Darwin whatever credit the natural selection theory 
is entitled to, since, singularly enough, both he and Darwin 
hit upon this hypothesis simultaneously, though inde¬ 
pendently, which the latter by priority of publication got 
the credit of. 
It is rather amusing to a calm and dispassionate observer 
of the progress of the modern evolution theory to see how 
eagerly and uncritically the non-scientific world (and 
occasionally even the scientific world) has accepted the doc¬ 
trine of genetic descent by natural selection, under the label 
Darwinism. For it is a regrettable fact that, to the non- 
scientific mind, a conviction of what constitutes Darwinism, 
or even evolution (the terms are by no means synonymous), 
is often sadly at variance with the truth. 
But if the non-scientific supporters of Darwin amuse us 
by their exuberant excess of belief, the opponents of evolu¬ 
tion of the same class often display an egregious ignorance 
of the matter concerning which they are speaking or writing. 
In many books and fugitive articles written for the purpose 
of disproving the theory of evolution, the writer’s conception 
of what evolution really is, and of the nature of Darwin’s 
contribution to the problem, is a curious jumble of half- 
understood, half misapprehended truths. Whether it be from 
the force of education and training, from an innate repug¬ 
nance to adopting anything new, or, as I apprehend is 
generally the case, a lack of knowledge of the facts, combined 
with a mental inability to weigh evidence—whatever, I say, 
be the cause — these writers are found opposing evolution 
with as much zeal and unreason as usually characterize the 
bitterest polemical controversies. Only last year I saw in 
a religious paper a two-column would-be refutation of the 
