naturalists have formed their opinion concerning it? If its author is to be condemned, let it, at any rate, not be before he has been heard."

Lamarck was the Lazarus of biology. I wish his more fortunate brethren, instead of intoning the old Church argument that he has " been refuted over and over again," would refer us to some of the best chapters in the writers who have refuted him. My own reading has led me to become moderately well acquainted with the literature of evolution, but I have never come across a single attempt fairly to grapple with Lamarck, and it is plain that neither Isidore Geoffroy nor M. Martins knows of such an attempt any more than I do. When Professor Ray Lankester puts his finger on Lamarck's weak places, then, but not till then, may he complain of those who try to replace Mr. Darwin's doctrine by Lamarck's. Professor Ray Lankester concludes his note thus:

"That such an attempt should be made is an illustration of a curious weakness of humanity. Not infrequently, after a long contested cause has triumphed, and all have yielded allegiance thereto, you will find, when few generations have passed, that men have clean forgotten what and who it was that made that cause triumphant, and ignorantly will set up for honour the name of a traitor or an impostor, or attribute to a great man as a merit deeds and thoughts which he spent a long life in opposing.'

Exactly so; that is what one rather feels, but surely Professor Ray Lankester should say "in trying to filch while pretending to oppose and to amend." He is complaining here that people persistently ascribe Lamarck's doctrine to Mr. Darwin. Of course they do; but, as I have already perhaps too abundantly asked, whose fault is this? If a man knows his own mind, and wants others to understand it, it is not often that he is misunderstood for any length of time. If he finds he is being misapprehended in a way he does not like, he will write another book and make his meaning plainer. He will go on doing this for as long time as he thinks necessary. I do not suppose, I do not suppose, for example, that people

will say I originated the theory of descent by means of natural selection from among fortunate accidents, or even that I was one of its supporters as a means of modification; but if this impression were to prevail, I cannot think I should have much difficulty in removing it. At any rate no such misapprehension could endure for more than twenty years, during which I continued to address a public who welcomed all I wrote, unless I myself aided and abetted the mistake. Mr. Darwin wrote many books, but the impression that Darwinism and evolution, or descent with modification, are identical is still nearly as prevalent as it was soon after the appearance of the Origin of Species; the reason of this is, that Mr. Darwin was at no pains to correct us. Where, in any one of his many later books, is there a passage which sets the matter in its true light, and enters a protest against the misconception of which Professor Ray Lankester complains so bitterly? The only inference from this is, that Mr. Darwin was not displeased at our thinking him to be the originator of the theory of descent with modification, and did not want us to know more about Lamarck than he could help. If we wanted to know about him, we must find out what he had said for ourselves, it was no part of Mr. Darwin's business to tell us; he had no interest in our catching the distinctive difference between himself and that writer; perhaps not; but this approaches closely to wishing us to misunderstand it. When Mr. Darwin wished us to understand this or that, no one knew better how to show it to us.

We were aware, on reading the Origin of Species, that there was a something about it of which we had not full hold; nevertheless we gave Mr. Darwin our confidence at once, partly because he led off by telling us that we must trust him to a great extent, and explained that the present book was only an instalment of a larger work which, when it came out, would make everything perfectly clear; partly, again, because the case for descent with modification, which was the leading idea throughout the book, was so obviously strong, but perhaps mainly because every one said Mr. Darwin was so

good, and so much less self-heeding than other people; besides, he had so patiently" and "carefully accumulated "such a vast store of facts" as no other naturalist, living or dead, had ever yet even tried to get together; he was so kind to us with his, " May we not believe?" and his "Have we any right to infer that the Creator?" etc. "Of course we have not," we exclaimed, almost with tears in our eyes-"not if you ask us in that way." Now that we understand what it was that puzzled us in Mr. Darwin's work we do not think highly either of the chief offender, or of the accessories after the fact, many of whom are trying to brazen the matter out and on a smaller scale to follow his example.

T

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: PER CONTRA

HE EVIL THAT MEN DO LIVES AFTER THEM”1 is happily not so true as that the good lives after them, while the ill is buried with their bones, and to

no one does this correction of Shakespeare's unwonted spleen apply more fully than to Mr. Darwin. Indeed it was somewhat thus that we treated his books even while he was alive; the good, descent, remained with us, while the ill, the deification of luck, was forgotten as soon as we put down his work. Let me now, therefore, as far as possible, quit the ungrateful task of dwelling on the defects of Mr. Darwin's work and character, for the more pleasant one of insisting upon their better side, and of explaining how he came to be betrayed into publishing the Origin of Species without reference to the works of his predecessors.

In the outset I would urge that it is not by any single book that Mr. Darwin should be judged. I do not believe that any one of the three principal works on which his reputation is founded will maintain with the next generation the place it has acquired with ourselves; nevertheless, if asked to say who was the man of our own times whose work had produced the most important, and, on the whole, beneficial effect, I should perhaps wrongly, but still both instinctively and on reflection, name him to whom I have, unfortunately, found myself in more bitter opposition than to any other in the whole course of my life. I refer, of course, to Mr. Darwin.

His claim upon us lies not so much in what is actually found within the four corners of any one of his books, as in the fact of his having written them at all-in the fact of his having brought out one after another, with descent always for its keynote, until the lesson was learned too thoroughly to make it at all likely that it will be forgotten. Mr. Darwin wanted to move his generation, and had the penetration to see that this is not done by saying a thing once for all and leaving it. It almost seems as though it matters less what a man says than the number of times he repeats it, in a more

1 As these pages are on the point of going to press, I see that the writer of an article on Liszt in the Athenaeum makes the same emendation on Shakespeare's words that I have done.

or less varied form. It was here the author of the Vestiges of Creation made his most serious mistake. He relied on new editions, and no one pays much attention to new editionsthe mark a book makes is almost always made by its first edition. If, instead of bringing out a series of amended editions during the fifteen years' law which Mr. Darwin gave him, Mr. Chambers had followed up the Vestiges with new book upon new book, he would have learned much more, and, by consequence, not have been snuffed out so easily once for all as he was in 1859 when the Origin of Species appeared.

The tenacity of purpose which appears to have been one of Mr. Darwin's most remarkable characteristics was visible even in his outward appearance. He always reminded me of Raffaelle's portrait of Pope Julius the Second, which, indeed, would almost do for a portrait of Mr. Darwin himself. I imagine that these two men, widely as the sphere of their action differed, must have been like each other in more respects than looks alone. Each, certainly, had a hand of iron; whether Pope Julius wore a velvet glove or no, I do not know; I rather think not, for, if I remember rightly, he boxed Michael Angelo's ears for giving him a saucy answer. We cannot fancy Mr. Darwin boxing any one's ears; indeed there can be no doubt he wore a very thick velvet glove, but the hand underneath it was none the less of iron. It was to his tenacity of purpose, doubtless, that his success was mainly due; but for this he must inevitably have fallen before the many inducements to desist from the pursuit of his main object, which beset him in the shape of ill health, advancing years, ample private means, large demands upon his time, and a reputation already great enough to satisfy the ambition of any ordinary man.

I do not gather from those who remember Mr. Darwin as a boy, and as a young man, that he gave early signs of being likely to achieve greatness; nor, as it seems to me, is there any sign of unusual intellectual power to be detected in his earliest book. Opening this " almost " at random I read "Earthquakes alone are sufficient to destroy the prosperity