or run up against it, or have it run up against him, as it does against some people, but it is only a very sensible person who does not lose it. Moreover, once begin to go behind achievement and there is an end of everything. Did the world give much heed to or believe in evolution before Mr. Darwin's time? Certainly not. Did we begin to attend and be persuaded soon after Mr. Darwin began to write? Certainly yes. Did we ere long go over en masse? Assuredly. If, as I said in Life and Habit, any one asks who taught the world to believe in evolution, the answer to the end of time must be that it was Mr. Darwin. And yet the more his work is looked at, the more marvellous 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 are ever on the watch for new ideas, ever ready to give a helping hand to those who are trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even their most cherished ideas if truth requires them at their 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," etc. 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 generalize from this yearly ceremony, 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 pardoned 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 (13th July 1876), or in some one of his subsequent books. If his attitude towards those who worked in the same field as himself had been the generous one which his admirers pretend, he would have certainly come forward, not necessarily as adopting Professor Hering's theory, but still as helping it to obtain a hearing.

His not having done so is of a piece with his silence about Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck in the early editions of the Origin of Species, and with the meagre reference to them which is alone found in the later ones. It is of a piece also with the silence which Mr. Darwin invariably maintained when he saw his position irretrievably damaged, as, for example, by Mr. Spencer's objection already referred to, and by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin in the North British Review (June 1867). Science, after all, should form a kingdom which is more or less not of this world. The ideal scientist should know neither self nor friend nor foe-he should be able to hob-nob with those whom he most vehemently attacks, and to fly at the scientific throat of those to whom he is personally most attached; he should be neither grateful for a favourable review nor displeased at a hostile one; his literary and scientific life should be something as far apart as possible from his social; it is thus, at least, alone that any one will be able to keep his eye single for facts, and their legitimate inferences. We have seen Professor Mivart lately taken to task by Mr. Romanes for having said1 that Mr. Darwin was singularly sensitive to criticism, and made it impossible for Professor Mivart to continue friendly personal Fortnightly Review, January 1886.

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relations with him after he had ventured to maintain his own opinion. I see no reason to question Professor Mivart's accuracy, and find what he has said to agree alike with my own personal experience of Mr. Darwin, and with all the light that his works throw upon his character.

The most substantial apology that can be made for his attempt to claim the theory of descent with modification is to be found in the practice of Lamarck, Mr. Patrick Matthew, the author of the Vestiges of Creation, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, and, again, in the total absence of complaint which this practice met with. If Lamarck might write the Philosophie Zoologique without, so far as I remember, one word of reference to Buffon, and without being complained of, why might not Mr. Darwin write the Origin of Species without more than a passing allusion to Lamarck? Mr. Patrick Matthew, again, though writing what is obviously a résumé of the evolutionary theories of his time, makes no mention of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, or Buffon. I have not the original edition of the Vestiges of Creation before me, but feel sure I am justified in saying that it claimed to be a more or less Minerva-like work, that sprang full armed from the brain of Mr. Chambers himself. This at least is how it was received by the public; and, however violent the opposition it met with, I cannot find that its author was blamed for not having made adequate mention of Lamarck. When Mr. Spencer wrote his first essay on evolution in the Leader (20th March 1852) he did indeed begin his argument," Those who cavalierly reject the doctrine of Lamarck," etc., so that his essay purports to be written in support of Lamarck; but when he republished his article in 1858, the reference to Lamarck was cut out.

I make no doubt that it was the bad example set him by the writers named in the preceding paragraph which betrayed Mr. Darwin into doing as they did, but being more conscientious than they, he could not bring himself to do it without having satisfied himself that he had got hold of a more or less distinctive feature, and this, of course, made matters worse. The distinctive feature was not due to any deep-laid plan for

pitchforking mind out of the universe, or as part of a scheme of materialistic philosophy, though it has since been made to play an important part in the attempt to further this; Mr. Darwin was perfectly innocent of any intention of getting rid of mind, and did not, probably, care the toss of sixpence whether the universe was instinct with mind or no-what he did care about was carrying off the palm in the matter of descent with modification, and the distinctive feature was an adjunct with which his nervous, sensitive, Gladstonian nature would not allow him to dispense

And why, it may be asked, should not the palm be given to Mr. Darwin if he wanted it, and was at so much pains to get it? Why, if science is a kingdom not of this world, make so much fuss about settling who is entitled to what? At best such questions are of a sorry personal nature, that can have little bearing upon facts, and it is these that alone should concern us. The answer is, that if the question is so merely personal and unimportant, Mr. Darwin may as well yield as Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck; Mr. Darwin's admirers find no difficulty in appreciating the importance of a personal element as far as he is concerned; let them not wonder, then, if others, while anxious to give him the laurels to which he is entitled, are somewhat indignant at the attempt to crown him with leaves that have been filched from the brows of the great dead who went before him. Palmam qui meruit ferat. The instinct which tells us that no man in the scientific or literary world should claim more than his due is an old and, I imagine, a wholesome one, and if a scientific self-denying ordinance is demanded, we may reply with justice, Que messieurs les Charles-Darwiniens commencent. Mr. Darwin will have a crown sufficient for any ordinary brow remaining in the achievement of having done more than any other writer, living or dead, to popularize evolution. This much may be ungrudgingly conceded to him, but more than this those who have his scientific position most at heart will be well advised if they cease henceforth to demand.

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ND NOW I BRING THIS BOOK TO A CONclusion. So many things requiring attention have happened since it was begun that I leave it in a very different shape to the one which it was originally intended to bear. I have omitted much that I had meant to deal with, and have been tempted sometimes to introduce matter the connection of which with my subject is not immediately apparent. Such, however, as the book is, it must now go in the form into which it has grown almost more in spite of me than from malice prepense on my part. I was afraid that it might thus set me at defiance, and in an early chapter expressed a doubt whether I should find it redound greatly to my advantage with men of science; in this concluding chapter I may say that doubt has deepened into something like certainty. I regret this, but cannot help it.

Among the points with which it was most incumbent upon me to deal was that of vegetable intelligence. A reader may well say that unless I give plants much the same sense of pleasure and pain, memory, power of will, and intelligent perception of the best way in which to employ their opportunities that I give to low animals, my argument falls to the ground. If I declare organic modification to be mainly due to function, and hence in the closest correlation with mental change, I must give plants, as well as animals, a mind, and endow them with power to reflect and reason upon all that most concerns them. Many who will feel little difficulty about admitting that animal modification is upon the whole mainly due to the secular cunning of the animals themselves will yet hesitate before they admit that plants also can have a reason and cunning of their own.

Unwillingness to concede this is based principally upon the error concerning intelligence to which I have already referred-I mean to our regarding intelligence not so much as the power of understanding as that of being understood by ourselves. Once admit that the evidence in favour of a plant's knowing its own business depends more on the efficiency with which that business is conducted than either