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DEDICATED BY PERMISSION TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
THE COMMON SENSE OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND.
THE
Demands of Darwinism
- ON
Credulity.
“Nihil tam absurdum quod non guidam Philosophe
diverint.”—CICERO.
“—MAN IS DESCENDED FROM A HAIRY QUADRUPED, FURNISHED WITH A
TAIL AND POINTED EARS.”—Dazzwin.
“DIFFERENTIATED INTO MAN.”—Zyndall,
“O SAPIENTIA l’—Prayer Book Calendar.
º
THE REV. F. O'MORRIS, B.A.,
AUTHOR OF A HISTORY OF BRITISH BIRDS,
DEDICATED BY PERMISSION TO HER MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY THE
QUEEN, ETC., ETC., ETC.
LONDON: PARTRIDGE AND CO., PATERNOSTER ROW.
AND TO BE HAD FROM ALL THE RAILWAY BOOKSTALLS.
“There is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation
of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct.”
“If one species has an advantage over another, it will, in a
very brief time, wholly or in part supplant it.”
“The very process of Natural Selection constantly tends, as
has been often remarked, to eaſterminate the parent forms and
the intermediate links.”
“All the intermediate forms between the earlier and later
states, as well as the original parent itself, will generally tend
to become extinct.”
“The whole history of the world as at present known,
although of a length quite incomprehensible by us, will here-
after be recognised as a mere fragment of time, compared with
the ages which have elapsed since the first Creature, the pro-
genitor of innumerable extinct and living descendants was
created.”
“Innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings
have all been descended, each within its own class or group,
from Common Parents.”
“I believe that animals have descended from at most only
four or five progenitors.”
“Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the
belief that all animals and plants have descended from some
One prototype.”
“I should infer from analogy that probably all the organised
beings which have ever lived on this earth, have descended from
Some one primordial form.”
C. DARWIN.
§ beliefit in (Şut the father 3/mighty, ſilaher of jeaſºn amb
(&arty.
‘Uhe 3Apostles' (irect,
HAVE much pleasure in giving the following PEDIGREE AND
|BLAZON OF THE COAT OF ARMS OF THE DARWINIAN FAMILY.
The antiquity of this very ancient race is beyond dispute, its genealogy
having been furnished by the present head of the family himself, so that
its authenticity and its genuineness are both alike established.
It traces its origin to an ancestor who lived, or vegetated, it is not quite
certain which, billions upon billions of years before the “Year One" of our
records. It is briefly given, as above stated, on a page of the present
work, from which it is clearly shown that neither families of Norman, or
Saxon, or even before them, of Ancient British origin, are fit to be
named in the same day with it for precedence.
It is also extremely interesting to notice that a coat of arms was borne
by the first man—so, though not quite correctly, strictly speaking, to call
him—although it appears that he wore no other clothes of any kind.
Of still more importance is it to note that all the doubts which have
heretofore existed as to the Origin of language, are hereby and for ever
set at rest,
For though it is, indeed, true that in our times mottoes may be changed
at pleasure, while shields and Crests can not, yet it need not for a moment
be supposed that such was the case in that early period whereunto “no
record or memory of man runneth.”
Hence, “I believe,” “we may believe,” “I cannot doubt,” “I can indeed
hardly doubt,” “I think,” “we may conclude,” “It is probable,” “we
may infer,” “we may safely assume,” by the “Use of the Imagination,”
or, in other words, it is certain, from the mottoes borne by this most
ancient family, that both Latin and English were, in common parlance,
the speech of the great ancestor of the Darwinian race.
BLAZON OF THE CoAT OF ARMS OF THE DARWINIAN FAMILY.
Party per pale, quarterly, first and fourth, azure (“the infinite azure of
the past,” Tyndall,) a demi-semi-savage, sable, standing on vacancy,
decorated with the Order of the Garter on the right knee, and with a long
tail curled up ; over it a scroll with the legend, “I could a tale unfold,”
and the motto, “Non TALI antasilio.” Second and third, erminois, a
mermaid, vert, in full ball costume, crined, hair dressed a la Eugénie, and
wreathed with an embroidered Sash or girdle marked with the words,
“Descinitin piscem milier formosa superne.”
4
On an escutcheon of pretence, per bend, gules and argent, interchanged
a Philosopher, in Puris Naturalibus Selectissimis, standing on the air, in
hubibus, gorged with a bar sinister, and holding in both his hands a
library of lectures, intituled, “De omnibus rebus et quibusadam aliis.”
Crest, a monkey rising out of a monad, all improper, within a halo of
moonshine,
Supporters, dexter, a bear naiant, argent, tusked and langued, “with
his mouth open catching flies” (Darwin), “very like a whale’’ (ditto).
Sinister, a giraffe, rampant reguardant, gules, the tail nowhere, but in
place of it the legend, Non est inventus, and over the head a swarm of flies.
Mottoes : Above the arms, Qui vult decipi decipiatur ; beneath the arms,
Sic volo, stet pro ratione voluntas ; under the crest, “Homo sum ;” above
the crest, “Am I not a man and a brother ?”
With these few prefatory remarks I leave the following “Confession of
Faith ” of the present representative of the “Origin" of mankind, to
commend itself, as best it may, to the common sense of the people of
England, well assured and confident that they will thoroughly appreciate
the value or otherwise of Darwinism to immortal men,
“The old questions whence men come and whither they go, and what
is the end of all their labour, still perplex philosophers and trouble the
simple. The anxieties of the human soul force their way even through
Erench logic into the midst of the Positive Philosophy. As long as Such
questions are asked, so long will there be an ear for an answer.”
TIMEs, October, 1886.
“The Science of those of his books which have made his chief title to
fame, the “Origin of Species,' and still more the ‘Descent of Man,’ is not
Science, but a mass of assertions and absolutely gratuitous hypotheses,
often evidently fallacious. This kind of publication and those theories
are a bad example which a body that respects itself cannot encourage.”—
LES MONDES.
[Darwin having been refused membership, as a correspondent, with
the French Academy of Sciences, on the ground of the unscientific
character of his books.]
|P R E FA C E .
“Nec mells hic Sermo est.”—HoRACE.
*
OPINIONS OF MEN OF LIGHT AND LEADING ON THE DARWIN CRAZE.
“A Gospel of Dirt.”—THOMAS CARLYLE.
“I venture to think that no system of Philosophy that has
ever been taught on earth lies under such a weight of antecedent
improbability.”—THE DUKE OF ARGYLL, in the Contemporary
Review.
“With minds off their balance, inconclusive arguments,
confidently presented and reiterated, very easily pass for proofs.
The history of human thought is full of baseless speculations,
which nevertheless in their day attracted crowds of enthusiastic
disciples.”—LORD SELBORNE, LORD CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND.
“Dogma often rages where we least expect it. Among
Scientific men the theory of evolution is at present becoming, or
has become, a dogma. What is the result 2 No objections are
listened to, no objections recognised, and a man like Virchow,
who has the moral courage to say that the descent of man from
any ape whatsoever is, as yet, before the tribunal of Scientific
Zoology, ‘not proven,” is howled down.”—Professor MAX MüLLER,
in the Contemporary Review.
“While facts should be taught, conjecture should only be
mentioned as conjecture. The production of the first Organism
out of inorganic matter has never been proved, and the connec-
tion between monkeys and men is unintelligible to those who
are content to argue from what comes under their observation.
Every attempt to form our problems into doctrines, to introduce
Our hypotheses as the bases of instruction by a religion of
evolution—be assured, gentlemen, every such attempt will make
shipwreck, and in its wreck will also bring with it the greatest
peril for the whole position of Science.”—Professor WIRCHOW,
of Berlin. .
6
“You are aware that I am now specially engaged in the study
of anthropology; but I am bound to declare that every positive
advance which we have made in the province of prehistoric
anthropology has actually removed us further from the proof
of such a conviction. When we study the fossil man of the
quaternary period, who must, of course, have stood comparatively
near our primitive ancestors in the series of descent, or rather of
ascent, we always find a man just such as men are now. As
recently as ten years ago, whenever a skull was found in a peat
bog, Ör in pile dwellings, or in ancient caves, people fancied they
Saw in it a wonderful token of a Savage state still quite un-
developed. They Smelt out the very scent of the ape—Only
the trail has gradually been lost more and more : The old
Troglodytes, pile villages, and bog people prove to be quite a
respectable Society. They have heads so large that many
a living person would be only too happy to possess such.”
Professor WIRCHow.
“The cold water the Professor (Virchow) dashed into the face
of these vain imaginings has sobered public opinion, and con-
tributed to a wholesome reaction.”—TIMEs.
“In the attempt to deduce ourselves and our surroundings
from the primaval condition of matter by mere evolution—by
which I mean the blind operation of natural laws—he is obliged
to endow with emotion the ultimate molecules of matter in
a fiery nebula, and to adopt a Series of conjectures against
which common sense rebels. The glove is boldly taken up, and
the result is a reductio ad absurdum.”—Dr. STOKES, Professor
of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge.
“For many years past I have endeavoured to bring before the
readers of this paper evidences from the structure of various
mammalia—birds and fishes—that everything was made with
infinite wisdom by the Almighty Creator, who himself pronounced
His work ‘very good.’ In the structure of the gannet, I put in
the witness box a bird admirably constructed, as we have seen,
for its habits and mode of capturing its prey. I have no need to
employ counsel in this case. I simply ask my readers to
constitute themselves a jury. They cannot help pronouncing
the mechanism of the bird ‘perfect,' and that some Great
7
Designer has worked it out. I would then ask if in their opinion
it was possible during the lapse of many thousands of years—
millions if you like—it was possible for the gamet to develope
within its own body the most perfect aeronautic machinery that
can be conceived.”—FRANK BUCKLAND.
“We object to the attempt occasionally made in these restless
days to palm off upon us mere imaginative conjectures as the
conclusions of Science.”—THE ARchbishop of CANTERBURY, 1880.
“You know all is development. The principle is perpetually
going on. First there was nothing ; then there was Something :
then—I forget the next. I think there were shells, then fishes,
then we came. Tiet me see : did we come next 2 Never mind
that ; we came at last. And the next change there will be some-
thing very Superior to us —something with wings. Ah that's
it : we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows.”—D'IsPAELI.
“On the whole, we must really acknowledge that there is
a complete absence of any fossil type, a lower stage of develop-
ment of man. Nay, if we gather together the whole sum of the
fossil men hitherto known and put them parallel with those of
the present time, we can decidedly pronounce that there are
among living men a much greater number of individuals who
show a relatively inferior type than there are among the fossils
known up to this time.”—Dr. WIRCHOw.
“But one thing I must Say—that not one single fossil skull
of an ape, or an anthropoid ape has yet been found that could
really have belonged to a human being. Every addition to the
amount of objects which we have obtained as materials to
discuss, has removed us further from the hypothesis pro-
pounded.”—Dr. WIRCHow. -
“As a matter of fact, we must positively recognise that as yet
there always exists a sharp line of demarcation between man
and the ape.”—Dr. WIRCHOw.
“All we have to do is to wait. Nominalism, and that
Sensationalism which has sprung from Nominalism, are running
fast to Seed. Comptism Seems to me its supreme effort, after
which the Whirligig of time may bring round its revenges, and
Realism and we who hold the Realist creed may have our turn.
Only wait—the end of that Philosophy is very near. The tide
is setting in against Darwinism.”—C. KINGSLEY.
8
“There is a great deal of what cannot but be regarded as
fallacious and misleading philosophy — oppositions of Science
falsely so called '—abroad in the world at the present time.
And I hope to satisfy you that those who set up their own
conceptions of the orderly sequence which they discern in the
phaenomena of nature, as fixed and determinate laws by which
those phaenomena not only are, within all human experience, but
always have been, and always must be, invariably governed, are
really guilty of the intellectual arrogance they condemn in the
systems of the ancients, and place themselves in diametrical
antagonism to those real philosophers, by whose comprehensive
grasp and penetrating insight that Order has been So far
disclosed.”—Dr. CARPENTER, President of the British ASSociation.
To the Editor of the TIMEs.
Sir, After the many solid arguments adduced in your late
admirable and most welcome notices of Mr. Charles Darwin's
recent work, I should like to make only one suggestion. Mr.
Darwin's theory requires us to believe that animal life existed
on this globe at a period when, according to a theory much more
plausible than his, the earth, and all the planets, with the Sun,
constituted but one diffused nebula. Astronomers really have
some data on which to found this theory of theirs, since marked
variations in the conformation of Several nebulae within historic
times are now on record; whereas all the variations which Mr.
Darwin has been able to point out in species, and especially in
man, within the same limits of time, are either 2010 or of an
extremely nebulous character.—I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
ASTRONOMICUs.
“The subtle Sophistries of his (Huxley's) School are doing
infinitely more mischief than the outspoken blasphemy of
Bradlaugh.”—J. M. WINN, Esq., M.D., M.R. C.P.
“It is the part of common sense not only to be helped by
Science, but to lend help to it in turn, and to restrain its possible
vagaries and vain ambitious efforts after what can never be of
any use.”—TIMEs.
‘Of the great truths of religion, most men of common Sense,
whether scientists or not are fully persuaded. That such argu-
ments should be needed at all is, indeed, the greatest reproach
9
to this scientific age. No one can believe that Sir Isaac Newton,
had he lived in these days, would have been perverted to atheism
and disbelief in a future state by microscopic discoveries which
have upset the faith of some less mature and well-balanced
intellects in modern times. Hear his own noble confession in
the ‘Principia; ’ ‘The world was not made by the Spontaneous
energy and evolution of self-developing powers, as some have
affirmed in latter days; but it was created by One Almighty,
Eternal, Wise, and good Being—God.” To this confession We
must return at last when all the fields of modern Scientific
discovery are exhausted. The great facts of life and death are
realities of too solemn and terrible a character to be made the
sport of eccentric thinkers however distinguished in mathematical
or physical science; nor can they be realized without a belief in
that Almighty Being to whom every man of common Sense feels
himself accountable.”—TIMEs.
“For this reason we must needs express our disappointment
with the more important part of Mr. Darwin's book, His
discussion of the faculties of man in comparison with those of
animals appears to us utterly inadequate to the subject, inde-
pendently of its being insufficient to sustain his theory. As it
Seems to us, he has not merely failed, but he has not duly
grappled with the essential difficulties of the question. He has
thought it possible to leap by the aid of a few illustrations over
the momentous and arduous questions respecting the mental
powers of men and animals, and the moral nature of man is
dissected with a most rapid and unpenetrating hand. We can
Only express our conviction on this point by saying that on these
Subjects Mr. Darwin appears quite out of his element.”—TIMEs.
“For a natural philosopher to appeal to such superficial
resemblances is much the same as for an astronomer to appeal
to the apprehension of the vulgar with respect to the motions of
heavenly bodies. But the truth is that Mr. Darwin's argument
is at every point supplemented by enormous assumption. The
utmost he proves, not merely in his present but in his former
book, is not what has been, but what may have been, and he
converts the ‘may into a ‘must by the sole force of the ever-
present assumption that all forms of nature have been developed
10
Out of other forms. To our minds, the book bears in its very
mode of expression, of which we have given some illustrations
above, a character which is wholly unscientific. Science tells us
what has been, what is, and what will be. But Mr. Darwin's
argument is a continuous conjugation of the potential mood. It
rings the changes on ‘ can have been,’ ‘might have been,’ ‘Would
have been,” until it leaps with a bound into “must have been.’”—
TIMEs.
“When Mr. Darwin is confronted with the extremely remote
and uncertain nature of the agencies on which he relies, he con-
tinually falls back on what “might have been in the lapse of
unlimited periods of time. Such a style of argument is, to say
the least, destitute of any scientific value. It is impossible to Say
What might or might not have been during periods so vast that
We have no experience of them. For all we know, the vitality of
Species might wear itself out in the lapse of ages, or by some law
of cyclic change, they might assume new forms. To call in aid
Such an indefinite agency is a mere veil for ignorance. It may
even be doubted whether to assert that a process takes effect in
an indefinite time, be not simply a roundabout way,” etc., etc.—
TIMEs.
“If, in short, in its general application, Mr. Darwin's
hypothesis is utterly unsupported by observed facts, it is still
more destitute of such support in its application to man.”—TIMEs.
“This is precisely the solution which Mr. Darwin is unable to
apply to his instances of approximation between species. If he
could say in a single instance, ‘Solvitur ambulando,” “here is a
case of One true species having passed into another,’ we should
have a practical proof that the kind of approximation he brings
to light is of such a kind as to end in coincidence. But this, as
We have seen, is what he has not dome. It is, in fact, not a little
Curious that the finite time which Newton demands is the very
condition most emergetically repudiated by Mr. Darwin and his
followers. They place no limit whatever to the amount of time
which their process requires. The knowledge of SO prolonged a
proof would have been of no practical avail even to Methuselah.
We are reminded, in fact, by such speculations, of the famous
Story which Corporal Trim endeavoured so effectually to recite to
11
Uncle Toby. “There was a certain king of Bohemia,” said
Trim ; “but in whose reign except his own, I am not able to
inform your honour.’” Uncle Toby was more accommodating
than we are able to be from a scientific point of view, but we
recommend the gracious permission he accorded to the Corporal
as a most appropriate motto for speculations of this kind.
“Leave out the date entirely, Trim,” said my Uncle Toby.”
In almost similar language ‘There was a certain Monkey,” says
Mr. Darwin; of that he is quite sure, and he frequently reiterates
the assurance; ‘but in what period or country, except his own, I
am not able to inform my readers.’ The certainty, unfortunately,
is hypothetical, and the particular monkey unknown.”—TIMEs.
“We are at a loss to understand the value of all this com-
plicated guess-work. It represents a kind of Ptolemaic theory of
creation heaping supposition on supposition and multiplying
cycles of action as each supposition requires to be supplemented.
It is the most conspicuous example yet afforded of that ‘Use of
the Imagination in Science,” on which Professor Tyndall dilated
with such unscientific enthusiasm last autumn. Mr. Darwin's
imagination is inexhaustible, and his power in this respect
contributes greatly to the charm of his strictly philosophical
writings, but he does not hesitate, in accordance with Professor
Tyndall’s advice, to let it take the place of Science when the
means and methods of Science fail.”—TIMEs.
“In section D (Anthropological Department), the meeting was
held in the great lecture theatre of the museum, so as to accom-
modate the large number of persons who desired to attend. The
question of human relationship with the ape was again talked
about (for it cannot be said to have been discussed) by many
speakers who vied with one another in loudness of declamation
and shallowness of argument.”—TIMEs.
“This assumption is the very point to be proved. To argue
from it is to assume the whole doctrine of evolution. The
assertion is Scientific or not, according as it is true or not. The
only Scientific question is whether, as a matter of fact, species
have been developed by force of circumstances out of other:
species, and man out of an ape. It is certainly no scientific
argument to assume that they must have been.”—TIMEs.
12
“Starting from the unsubstantial presumption just indicated,
Mr. Darwin proceeds to speculate on the manner of man's
development, without being able to adduce the slightest evidence
that facts correspond with his hypothesis. The history, however
ingenious, is purely imaginary from beginning to end.”—TIMES.
“Further consideration has led him to perceive an imperfection
in his hypothesis of natural Selection. “He had not,’ he says,
‘sufficiently considered the existence of many structures in
animals which appear to be, as far as we can judge, neither
beneficial or injurious; ' and this he believes to be one of the
greatest oversights yet detected in his work. In other words,
the action of Natural Selection will not of itself sustain the
theory of the continuous evolution of all organised beings from
inferior forms.”—TIMEs.
“That, at all events, is the practical result for all the purposes
of life. If, as seems to be admitted even by the most advanced
Evolutionists, species be so permanently fixed that millions of
years would be necessary to transform them, it follows that for all
human purposes they must be treated as permanently indepen-
dent.”—TIMEs.
“It is impossible to maintain unbroken gravity in discussing
such a dream. But let us turn to Mr. Darwin's investigation
of the physical basis of his conclusion, which appears to us
scarcely less unsatisfactory than his enquiry into its mental and
moral bearings. He simply accumulates a variety of points of
similarity between the human frame and that of animals.”—
TIMEs.
“There is much reason to fear that loose philosophy, stimu-
lated by an irrational religion, has done not a little to weaken
the force of these religious principles in France, and this is at
all events one potent element in the disorganization of French
Society. A man incurs a grave responsibility, who, with the
authority of a well-earned reputation, advances at Such a time
the disintegrating speculations of this book. He ought to be
capable of supporting them by the most conclusive evidence of
facts. To put them forward on such incomplete evidence, such
cursory investigation, such hypothetical arguments as we have
exposed, is more than unscientific—it is reckless.”—TIMES.
13
“We wish we could think that these speculations were as
innocuous as they are unpractical and unscientific, but it is too
probable that if unchecked they might exert a very mischievous
influence. We abstain from noticing their bearings on religious
thought, although it is hard to see how, on Mr. Darwin's
hypothesis, it is possible to ascribe to man any other immortality
or any other spiritual existence than that possessed by the
brutes. But apart from these considerations, if such views as
he advances on the nature of the moral Senses were generally
accepted, it seems evident that morality would lose all elements
of stable authority, and the “ever fixed marks' around which
the tempests of human passion now break themselves, would
cease to exert their guiding and controlling influence.”—TIMEs.
“It should be the work of science to reveal this difference, not
to construct theories on its mere apparent magnitude. But Mr.
Darwin urges that this homological construction of the whole
frame in the members of the same class is intelligible if we
admit their descent from a common progenitor, together with
their subsequent adaptation to diversified conditions. “On any
other view,’ he says, “the similarity of pattern between the
hand of a man or monkey, the foot of a horse, the flipper of a
seal, the wing of a bat, etc., is utterly inexplicable.' We fail to
see the inexplicability. What is there unreasonable in the
supposition that they have all been formed on the same general
plan 2 Mr. Darwin's Only objection is that ‘this is no scientific
explanation;' but this is simply to beg the question.”—TIMEs.
“We fear the truth is that the study of mental philosophy,
under the disastrous influence of one or two popular writers, has
of late years become extremely loose and Superficial, and Mr.
Darwin does but illustrate the general vagueness of thought
which prevails on Such subjects.”—TIMEs.
“M. Bonnier has scattered to the winds Darwin's grand
notion of the fertilization of plants by insects, and proved what
he said by a large collection of conclusive facts derived from an
examination of three hundred genera.”—TIMEs.
“Scientific men have been apt to commit the blunder of
mixing theological inferences with Scientific facts, and have not
infrequently assumed the proposition, “if my thesis is true, there
is no GoD.’”—SPECTATOR.
14
“Mr. Huxley's doctrine is in the same category of assumption
without proof and against evidence. He is not more logical than
his fellows, because he is more peremptory and scornful.
Granting that in physical structure man approximates nearer to
the ape than the ape to the lowest monkey, this is no argument
for either being descended from the other, till we have admitted
the two previous unproved hypotheses, universal evolution, and
the Savage origin of man. Again, physical structure is only one
element in specific classification, and in the case of man the
least important. His moral and intellectual nature is emphati-
cally his specific difference from other animals; and here it is
easy to retort Mr. Huxley's argument. The highest ape is
morally and intellectually more removed from the lowest Savage
than the latter from the most eminent philosopher. The Savage
may become a philosopher, but the ape never becomes even a
Savage. Neither can we detect the slightest tendency to such
moral or intellectual evolution. Mr. Darwin does, indeed, collect
some interesting anecdotes of quasihuman reason, and affections
in the lower animals, but it requires an enormous exercise of
“imagination' to elevate them into anything approaching to the
nature of man. Of this he seems to be aware when he asks with
a ludicrous sentimentality, ‘Who can say what cows feel when
they surround and stare intently on a dying or dead companion?’
Yes, who indeed ? There is nothing novel or scientific in this
sort of stuff; we have heard of dreaming dogs, and reasoning
elephants, and arithmetical pigs, and beavers' houses, and the
wonderful instinct of bees all our lives, and the common Sense of
mankind, gentle and simple, has long ago repudiated their real
community with the moral and intellectual nature of man.
Does Mr. Darwin hope to overcome the verdict by telling us
that :—
If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees,
there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the
worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers
would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of
interfering 7
What would be said if any advocate of Revelation resorted to
such puerile trifling 2 In the case supposed, the creatures would
not be men, but bees, and act like other bees. But that bees
15
ever think anything a 'sacred duty' is One of the thousand forms
of begging the question artfully scattered up and down the book.
Curiously enough, the best examples are found, not among the
apes, from which we ought to inherit, but among creatures so
remote in physical structure as the dog, the elephant and the
bee.
Amid all this irrelevant gossip, Mr. Darwin notices, with the
feeblest attempt at refutation, the crucial arguments that man
alone is capable of progressive improvement, and that man alone
fashions implements for a special purpose. To the first he can
only answer that in the hunting countries foxes are more wary
than in districts where they are not disturbed; and, to the second,
that the chimpanzee cracks nuts with a stone, and other apes
build temporary platforms (as birds build nests), which “might
readily grow into a voluntary or conscious act.' Might ! But
does it? And could it, unless we admit intellectual evolution,
and so once more beg the question ? It is astonishing how
persistently this artifice is resorted to throughout. It pervades
every part of the book, till by dint of repetition and incessant
assumption, often veiled in the most Subtle implications, the
reader is led to think a point demonstrated for which not a
shadow of evidence has been presented. Of the course of things,
when reason, language, and religion have been Once “acquired,’
Mr. Darwin writes as coolly as if such “acquisitions’ were of
common experience, instead of being the wildest speculation,
contrary to every conviction of our nature, and never in a single
instance confirmed or indicated by experiment. It is really an
abuse of language to call such writing ‘Scientific'; to mistake
the ‘Arabian Nights' for history would be far more excusable.”—
JoHN BULL.
“They did not "answer the expectations of those even who
heard them. Instead of argument there was imagination ;
instead of proof he gave assertion; and instead of conclusion he
ended with hypothesis. The very manner of the philosopher
was wanting; and, lest our well-known contempt for the
doctrine of evolution may be supposed to disqualify us for a
dispassionate judgment of its prime minister, we turn to the
daily press, and cite the remarks of all the papers we chanced to
16
open after the first lecture of the three:—‘There will be many,
however, who will insist that, as an argument professedly
sweeping away the whole Mosaic account of the Creation, it
generalized on insufficient data.’”—THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
(in speaking of Huxley's lectures).
“The practical influence of the new doctrine is seen in the
rise and rapid growth of a pseudo-Scientific sect, the sect of the
Darwinian evolutionists. This sect is largely recruited from the
crowd of facile minds, ever ready to follow the newest fashion in
art and Science, in Social or religious life, as accidents of
association or influence may determine.”—EDINBURGH REVIEW.
“The evidence in favour of the central Darwinian doctrine,
is notoriously deficient, but this is no hindrance to its
enthusiastic acceptance. Ardent neophytes easily personify the
principle of evolution, and clothe it in imagination with all the
powers necessary for the production of its reputed effects. On
all doubtful points, their subjective conviction is so strong as to
be independent of objective verification or outward proof of any
kind.”—EDINBURGH REVIEW.
“The cavils of Sceptics are of no avail with the true
evolutionist believer, because he has an unfaltering trust in his
own sacred books and inspired writers. At their bidding he is
ready to adopt not only things unsupported by reason, things
above and beyond reason, but things directly opposed to all
reason, all probability, and all experience.”—EDINBURGH REVIEw.
“Another note of Sectarianism in the evolutionists is their
tendency to intolerance. This is manifested, perhaps, in its
extremest form amongst the rank and file of the sect. It
displays itself, however, in various shapes, some of which are
amusing enough.”—EDINBURGH REVIEW.
“This tendency to intolerance appears also in the writings of
the school, especially in the less distinguished. The tone of the
discussion in many cases involves the tacit assumption that
the evolutionists are the only wise men, and wisdom itself will
die with them. This feature comes strongly out in the journals
of the School, in the free use of such terms as ‘exploded ' and
‘ extinct,' applied to all opposing theories and rival views.”—
EDINBURGH REVIEW.
17
“It is indeed impossible to over estimate the magnitude
of the issue. If our humanity be merely the natural pro-
duct of the modified faculties of brutes, most earnest-minded
men will be compelled to give up the motives by which they
have attempted to live noble and virtuous lives as founded on a
mistake ; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed
instinct, identical in kind with that of ants or bees, and the
revelation of God to us, and the hope of a future life, pleasurable
day-dreams invented for the good of society. If these views
be true, a revolution in thought is imminent which will shake
Society to its very foundation, by destroying the sanctity of the
conscience and the religious sense, for sooner or later they must
find expression in their lives.”—EDINBURGH REVIEw.
“The ‘Descent of Man,” the work of one of the leading
naturalists and philosophers of the age, remains to inoculate its
pernicious doctrines into the minds of future races.”—EDINBURGH
REVIEW.
“A passionate hatred of religion, however discreetly or
astutely veiled, lies at the bottom of much of the popular
metaphysical teaching now in vogue. No system is to be
tolerated which will lead men to accept a personal God, moral
responsibility, and a future state of rewards and punishments.
Let these unwelcome truths be once eliminated, and that system
which excludes them the most efficaciously becomes the most
acceptable.”—QUARTERLY REVIEw.
“The logical and dialectical faculty in which too many ‘abstract
thinkers’ are so unfortunately deficient.”—PALL MALL GAZETTE.
“The public has learnt—perhaps it is time they should—that
“men of science’ are not exempt as a body from the astounding
credulity which prevails in this country and in America. It is,
therefore, incumbent upon those who consider such credulity
deplorable to do all in their power to arrest its development.”—
IDR. LANCASTER.
“From those representations of human nature which tend to
assimilate to each other the faculties of man and of the brutes,
the transition to atheism is not very wide.”—DUGALD STEwART.
“I had rather believe all the follies of the Talmud and the
Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind— that
B
18
an army of infinite Small portions, or seeds unplaced, should have
produced this order and beauty without a Divine Marshal.”—BACON.
“Geology brings us down to a level when the character of the
earth made Organic life impossible.” “At this point, wherever
we place it, the Origin of animals by development was impossible,
because they had no ancestors.” “Facts are absolutely want-
ing.” “We cannot consider the development theory proved
because a few naturalists think it plausible. It seems plausible
only to the few, and it is demonstrated by none.”—AGASSIZ.
“No single case of evolution of one species from another has
come within the observation of man.”—DR. CARRUTHERs.
“Year after year has passed away without my being able to
trace the descent with modifications among the brachyopoda.
which the Darwinian theory requires.”—DAVIDSON.
“Popular scepticism was unceasingly guilty of confusion of
thought that could hardly be too strongly condemned. Doubtful
science, and, still more doubtful logic, were now united in the
discussion of all deeper subjects, and in none more than in
that of the great subject they were considering.”—DoCTOR
ELLICOTT, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol.
“I do not hesitate to declare my conviction that it is Professors
Huxley and Tyndall, who, more than anybody else, are respon-
sible for the Infidelity of the day.”—The REv. DR. SINCLAIR
PATERSON.
“Every few years Some reformer or another has sprung up
. and all past as well as all present experience further
shows that the greater the degree of dogmatism and effrontery
with which any such pretender proclaims his doctrine, the
greater in all probability will be his success in gaining patrons
amongst the credulous public.”—SIR. J. Y. SIMPSON, BART., M.D.
“The world was not made by the spontaneous energy and
evolution of self-developing powers, as some have affirmed in
latter days, but it was created by One Almighty, Eternal, Wise,
and Good Being—God.”—NEWTON.
A sceptic once said to a clergyman, “How do you reconcile
the teaching of the Bible with the latest conclusions of Science?”
His answer was, “I have not seen the morning papers—What
are the latest conclusions of Science 2"
19
“The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author."—
HUME.
“Matter can never exist and be active without mind.”—
GöETHE.
“How in the face of facts which they cannot but see, will
men talk or believe such incredible nonsense?”—DR. FRASER,
Bishop of Manchester. -
“I have looked into most philosophical systems, and I have
seen none that will work without a God”—all “unworkable.”
JAMES CLARK MAXWELL. -
“A gentleman living at Montreal recently ordered from
England the works of Professor Huxley, Professor Tyndall, and
Mr. Herbert Spencer; but the books were all stopped by the
Collector of Customs and confiscated as being “immoral,’
“irreligious, and injurious.” A similar thing has been known
to happen at Oxford.”—ATHENEUM. -
“An utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation, dishonour-
ing to nature and to science.”—QUARTERLY REVIEW.
“Eſe who determines against that which he knows because
there may be something which he knows not ; he that can set
hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty, is not to
be admitted amongst reasonable beings.”—DR. JoHNSON.
“The observation of the actual change of any one species
into another has not yet been recorded, and thus has been
furnished the confutation of the notion of the transformation of
the ape into the man.”—PROFESSOR SIR RICHARD OWEN.
“The Evolution theory is a scientific blunder, untrue in its
facts, unscientific in its method, and ruinous in its tendency.”—
PROFESSOR AGASSIZ.
“The word ‘philosopher,’ which meant originally “lover of
wisdom,’ has come to Some strange way to mean a man who
thinks it his business to explain everything in a certain number
of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to
his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the
system he sets up, because it is so much easier to put an empty
room tidy than a full one.”—PROFESSOR W. R. CLIFFORD.
“The highest intellect which issues in no *rtainly has com-
pletely failed.”—THOMAS CARLYLE, 1869.
20
“Darwinism shuts out almost the whole mass of acquired
knowledge, in order to retain and assimilate to itself that only
which may serve its doctrine.”—AGASSIZ.
“Evolutionists argue from ignorance as if from knowledge
. . . . in certain points it (evolution) agrees with certain
general facts and gives an explanation of a certain number of
phenomena. But it attains this result only by the aid of
hypotheses which are in flagrant contradiction with other
general facts quite as fundamental as those which they explain.”
—M. QUATREFER (“The Human Species”).
“Because it is every man's duty to know what he is, and not to
think of the embryo he was, nor the skeleton he will be.
Because also Darwin has a mortal fascination for all vainly
curious and idly speculative persons, and has collected, in the
train of him, every impudent imbecility in Europe, like a dim
comet wagging its useless tail of phosphorescent nothing across
the stedfast stars.”—RUSKIN.
“We might sufficiently represent the general manner of con-
clusion in the Darwinian system by the statement, that if you
fasten a hair brush to a mill wheel, with the handle forward, so
as to develop itself by moving always in the same direction, and
within continual hearing of a steam-whistle, after a certain
number of revolutions the hair brush will fall in love with the
whistle; they will marry, lay an egg, and the produce will be a
nightingale.”—RUSKIN, (“Grecian and English Birds”).
(“It must not be supposed that there is much unity among
these ‘philosophers.' But in this they all agree, they all argue
à posteriori, and they are all infallible.”)
21
THE DEMANDS OF DARWINISM
ON CREDULITY.
“NO DOUBT WE ARE THE PEOPLE, AND WISDOM SHALL DIE WITH Us.”
Fiat Evolutio ; rudit Caelum.
Credo, quia impossibile est.
We are bid to believe that life existed on this earth at a period
when, and before, for untold ages, astronomers tell us it was
impossible for any life to have existed on it at all, in its then
molten and incandescent state.
That this life was first brought to it at Some unknown epoch,
billions upon billions of ages ago, by a piece of moss adhering
unsinged to a red-hot thunderbolt, shattered off from Some
wrecked world in the illimitable regions of space, and so “flashed
into existence,” containing in it the “promise and potency” of
the whole of what is called creation.
That all existing plants and animals “may have been
developed from the seed of a seaweed,” itself derived from the
Said entity.
That this Fons et Origo of all future creation was either “at
first characteristically animal,” or “unequivocally vegetable,”
and that we “cannot doubt" but that it held in itself the
“potential element " of all living beings, as just Said.
That this was the “simple beginning ” of all things; a
creation; but without a Creator.
22
That every plant and animal has since acquired its present
form by minute accidental changes, one after another.
That these changes were progressively useful, though without
any intention that they should be.
That in the consequent “struggle for life,” those thus favoured
“survived,” and that all those not thus favoured were
exterminated.
That no plant or animal became what it is by design, but by
pure accident, favoured as aforesaid.
That every plant and animal is still “struggling” to keep its
place, if it can, in the scale of creation, and that every such
previous “struggle for life’’ must have “exterminated ” millions
upon millions and billions upon billions of luckless failures.
That on this principle of Natural Selection, both animals and
plants “may have been "“developed” from some “low form of
seaweed,” as above stated, and “if we admit this"—which must
be proved by being thus taken for granted—we must of course
“admit” that “all the organised beings have descended from
some one primordial form.”
That “Natural Selection is a power incessantly ready for
action, and is as Superior to man's feeble efforts as the works of
nature are to those of art.” In other words, as nature and
natural Selection are all as one, nature's works are as Superior to
man's as nature's works are.
That Natural Selection “always acts very slowly,” but that,
all the same, “many divergent forms spread rapidly.” That
though this is a palpable contradiction, we must get over
that slight “difficulty.” That in order to make a perfect animal
or creature of any kind, it is not at all necessary to know how to
make it. That all that is wanted are accident, ignorance, and
extermination, and that by these three acting together in
“correlation,” the whole of what is popularly called creation
came into being as we see it.
That “Natural Selection.” “results from the struggle for exist-
ence,” or, in other words, is the Result of Destruction ; that it
has been so with every part of every animal, the wing of the bat,
and the hand of the ape, as examples. That, in fact, the whole
of nature is one great battle-field, in which every living creature,
23
and every part of such, has been produced by the destruction of
its ancestors, time out of mind, and could only have “survived ”.
by the “extermination ” of every competitor in hecatombs, so
that its own life is, after all only a triumphant murder. That
the wing of the bat, the thousands of lenses in the eyes of many
Species of insects, the electrical organs of fish, and all the
wonders of nature were the results of Natural Selection, or, to
Speak more plainly, of “development,” “plastic tendencies,”
“slight modifications,” “generative variability,” and so on; and
this, though it is “most difficult to conjecture by what transitions
Such organs could ever have arrived at their present state”; and
that, though “nothing can be more hopeless than to explain this
similarity of pattern in members of the same class by Natural
Selection and the struggle for life.”
That the “difficulty of understanding” “the absence of
various piles and strata,” which no doubt were “Somewhere,”
is “very great,” but that the difficulty must be got over by the
“Use of the Imagination.”
That the “geological record ” is “imperfect to an extreme
degree,” though assertion is all that is forthcoming to prove it
to be so; and that the facts which geology does attest must be
disbelieved in favour of those furnished by the Said “Use of
the Imagination.”
That the most ancient of all rocks, which were “Somewhere
accumulated ” (in the land of dreams), were “many miles
thick”—if only we could find them.
That the sudden appearance of whole groups of Species in
Some strata, by no means overturns the doctrine of most slow
descent by Natural Selection, though Sedgwick, Agassiz, and
others have maintained that it does.
That though no trace of organic life has been detected in the
basement of these rocks, which are destitute of the remains of
any animals, yet that it is “indubitable that life survived in
that primitive region,” though we only meet with the lower
creatures at the foundation of the next, and with nothing
higher in the Scale of creation than fishes even in the
upper part of it. That it is enough that “certain forms
are Supplanted by new ones,” but that geology “does not
24
reveal” any traces of the “missing links,” in the chain
woven by Natural Selection.
That “assuredly, if this theory be true,” an “inconceivably
great” number of links must have existed “between all living
and extinct species,” though no trace of a single one of them
has ever been found, except in the “Imagination.” *-
That this must be believed, though Professor Sedgwick has
said that if a “theory” “proves no law, it is worse than
nothing; ” “it is nothing better than an imposture.”
That every useful variety is “preserved by the term ‘Natural
Selection; ’’’ as, for instance, that the “Swiftest and slimmest
wolves would have the best chance of Surviving and So be
preserved or Selected.” In other words, that they have been
Selected to be Selected; as if one were to say that when a ship
is wrecked, and a hundred of the crew, out of two hundred, who
have not learned to Swim are drowned, the other hundred are
Selected, and So, by parity of reasoning, if one of a ship-
wrecked crew proved himself a good Swimmer and saved his life,
all his children would be good Swimmers too, and turn into big
or little fishes.
We must believe, that “by considering the embryological
structure of man—the homologies which he presents with the
lower animals—the rudiments which he retains—and the
reversions to which he is liable, we can partly recall, in imagin-
ation, the former condition of our early progenitors, and can
approacimately place them in their proper position in the
Zoological Series. We thus (!) learn that man is descended from
a hairy quadruped, furnished with tail and pointed ears, probably
arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a
naturalist, would have been classed amongst the quadrumana, as
Surely as would the common and still more ancient progenitor
of the Old and New World monkeys. The quadrumana and all
the higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient
marsupial animal; and this, through a long line of diversified
forms, either from Some reptile-like or some amphibian-like
creature, and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim
obscurity of the past we can see (?) that the early progenitor of
25
all the vertebrata must have been (l) an aquatic animal,
provided with branchiae, with the two sexes united in the same
individual, and with the most important organs of the body
(such as the brain and heart) imperfectly developed. This
animal seems to have been more like the larva of our existing
marine Ascidians than any other known form.”
That we “cannot doubt that the theory of descent with
modification embraces all the members of the same class.”
That we “can indeed hardly doubt that all vertebrate animals
having true lungs are descended by Ordinary generation from an
ancient prototype, of which we know nothing, furnished with a
floating apparatus or Swim bladder.” -
That “It is conceivable, that the now utterly lost branchiae
might have been gradually worked in by Natural Selection for
Some quite distinct purpose, in the same manner as . . . it is
probable that organs which at a very ancient period served for
respiration, have been actually converted into organs of flight !”
That we can thus “partly recall” the former condition of our
earlier progenitors; though even that “partly ” is in “imagin-
ation 1" That thus ! too, we can “approa;imately place them in
their proper position ” (“in imagination ”). That we thus
learn,” also “in imagination,” about the “tail and pointed
ears,” “probably derived ” from something—or from Something
else “some reptile-like, or Some amphibian-like creature,” or
this again “from some fish-like animal.” Thus “in the dim
obscurity of the past we can see (?) what this animal must have
been.”
That, therefore, the origin of man is to be derived as
follows:—
1. Marine animals, resembling the larvae of existing
Ascidians.
2. Fishes as lowly organised as the Lancelet,
3. Fishes like the Lepidosirens.
4. Amphibians.
5. Reptiles.
6. Monotremata.
7. Marsupials.
8. Placental Mammals.
26
9. Lemuridae.
10. Simiada).
11. Old World Monkeys.
12. Man.
“O Most LAME AND IMPOTENT CONCLUSION |''
That though “it seems at first quite inconceivable how bees
have practically solved a recondite problem,” yet that “the
difficulty is not nearly so great" as it at first appeared.
That the bees learned by degrees to “strike imaginary
spheres,” being able “Somehow to know the proper distance ’’
to work at ; no doubt by the “Use of the Imagination.”
That the whole polity of the honey-bee has come out of
nothing, though there is no change to the present day from
what it was in Old Egypt. So long ago.
That the bee imagines a circle which it never really sweeps.
That it is Natural Selection that has, by degrees, in untold
ages upon ages, led the hive-bee to make its comb “absolutely
perfect in the Oeconomising of wax.”
That swarms after swarms must have been hatched with new
instincts, and a queen providing 20,000 eggs capable of “striking
imaginary spheres.”
That if humble-bees were to become rare in any country “it
might be a great advantage to red clover,” to have a shorter
flower, so that the “hive-bee should visit its flowers,” and that
thus “a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simulta-
neously, or one after another, modified and adapted in the most
perfect manner to each other.”
That this would be of mutual advantage to both of them, the
bee getting honey and the clover fertility, but only after the
destruction of millions of races of bees and of clover, till they
became suited to each other; and this self-sacrifice in Such
untold millions for what they had done without so well all along
before.
That “if the Mexican bee had made its spheres at given
distances from each other,” and “if she had made them of
equal sizes,” and “if she had arranged them symmetrically,”
and if she had made them “in a double layer,” and “if we
could slightly modify the instincts already possessed ” by her,
27
then the comb would “probably” have been as perfect as that
of the honey-bee; and withal “we must Suppose her to make
her cells truly spherical, and of equal sizes; ” we must suppose
her to “arrange her cells in level layers; ” “we must Suppose
that she does ‘somehow' accurately judge as to what distance
to stand from her fellow-labourers; ” and to “Suppose that she
can prolong the hexagon to any length requisite.” Only a
dozen suppositions—a mere bagatelle in “Science l’’
We must believe that the sterility of hybrids “can not possibly
be of any advantage to them.”—yet there it is ; but if everything
that is done in Nature has been done by Natural Selection, and
all for the good of those selected, so that hybridism could not
have been its work, by what other means was it introduced ?. In
brief, that Natural Selection had no hand in sterility; for it
could be no advantage, per se, to any creature, and yet that
sterility is a law of Nature. The difficulty there is, is left for
them to Settle between them.
On the other hand, and per contra, the sterility of the worker
bees “has been advantageous to the community, of which any
individual is a member.”
We must believe that it is a “strange arrangement” of Nature
to grant to species the power of producing hybrids,” and then to
say to them, “Hitherto shalt thou go and no farther ;” “No
road this way; ” and that it is not the case that “species have
been endowed with sterility simply to prevent their being con-
founded in Nature.” We must submit to be accused of only
being able to “slur it over as beyond our reasoning powers,”
though it must be confessed that we “do not understand, except
On vague hypothesis, several facts with regard to the sterility of
hybrids—that no explanation is offered of it—nor is it pretended
that the root of the matter is gone into ; no explanation is
offered why an organism, when placed under unnatural condi-
tions, is rendered sterile;” and that it is impossible to bring
forward one single case of the hybrid offspring of animals clearly
distinct, being itself perfectly fertile.
That John Hunter only displayed his ignorance when he held
that no proof has ever been obtained that a hybrid race can
continue. That De Candolle only blundered when he wrote that
28
“permanent differences cannot be referred to as one of the
actual courses of variations, and that these differences are what
constitute species.” That so did Lyell, who said that no single
permanent species has ever been produced by hybridity; and
Lawrence, who says that we “must admit for all the species
which we know at present a distinct origin and a common date; ”
and Cuvier, who declares “that there is no difference whatever
between the remains of animals embalmed in Egypt of old
and those of the present day.”
That originally the fertile males and females of the same
community transmitted to their fertile offspring a tendency to
produce sterile members, though what there was, or could be, to
bring such a thing about has never been shewn or even imagined.
That while this was going on, to make sterile members of a
future society which did not then exist, Some one female was
acting in the exactly opposite direction for the production of
mother general of the whole hive. In other words, that opposite
instincts were “coming into play” at one and the same time in
one and the same community: that, in fact, sterility came from
fertility, sterile grandchildren from fertile parents and grand-
parents, and vice versd—a still more fertile queen from one and
the same source. That thus a “slight modification in instinct”
(with no one to make it) “has been advantageous to the com-
munity.” That though a “change of instinct” is something
never before thought of in Natural History, we must believe that
“ certain members of the community” foresaw the benefit to it
of sterility, and were so very accommodating and obliging as to
agree to have sterile grandchildren, all but some One, who should
remain fertile, to the admiration and loyalty of the rest of the
Society.
That we must believe in the “long-continued Selection of the
fertile parents,” though by whom the “Selection” was made can
never be shewn or even guessed at, beyond that it all came
to pass in the “sequence of events.” | -
That “how the workers came to be sterile is a difficulty,” but
that it “disappears,” though “appearing insuperable,” by merely
imagining that selection may be exercised by a whole “family”
as well as by an “individual”—(as if families were not made up
of individuals).
29
That the bright colours in Snakes may “perhaps” be due to the
admiration of the male for the female, or of the female for the male.
That the beautiful eyes in the wing of the Argus Pheasant
were produced by the desire of the male bird to exhibit himself
to advantage before the female, “and in no other Way.”
That we must “see no reason to doubt,” that all the various
gorgeous tints of birds—and So, naturally, in their way, of
insects, snakes, and fishes too—were acquired by the admiration
of the females for the first fine “feather in the cap” of this,
that, or the other cock-bird, her would-be mate, though it is
difficult to account on this supposition for the black colour of the
crow and the dingy hue of the coot; for young birds being
at first without the plumage of their parents, and changing
backward and forward as they do in winter and Summer, while
some have every variety of colour in One and the same kind,
as the crosbill.
That Natural Selection has “given the proper colour to
grouse ’’ and other birds and insects for “preserving them from
danger,” so that they must have existed for millions of years
before they “selected ” their present colour, and so must have
existed equally well without it for all those long ages, until they
became as they are by the “aggregate action and production of
the sequence of events.”
That Natural Selection has turned the black Grouse to that
colour to be “like peat earth,” for its protection, though it is by
no means of that dull colour, but a most glossy black, and the
hen bird of a totally different brown colour.
That thus all organised beings have been produced by
empirical efforts at the cost of myriads of imperfect experiments,
so that the world has been one vast shambles of incalculable
slaughter for an inconceivable period of time.
That “Natural Selection results from the struggle for
existence,” or, in other words, is the Result of Destruction, as
already stated. That So it has been with every part, even
the most minute.
That in the “Race for existence" the weakest must succumb
to the stronger, though this is contradicted by the whole of
animated nature.
30
That though there has been “no advance in the Foraminiferous
type from the Palaeozoic period to the present time,” and though
the “present state of Scientific evidence, instead of sustaining
the idea that the primitive type or types of the Foraminifera can
ever rise to any higher grade, justifies the anti-Darwinian
inference that however widely they diverge from each other,
and from their origin, they still remain Foraminifera,” still
we must believe that they do not. -
That we ought never to refer to final causes, though Dr.
Whewell Says that we cannot help doing so, as we prove by
ourselves often using such expressions as Nature’s “Designs,”
and “Objects”; and that when we do, we must protest that we
use them only in a “wide metaphorical sense.”
We must believe that it “does not appear incredible,” though
as to how the “first steps in advance” came out of the original
simplest structure I (Darwin) can make no sufficient answer,”
“all speculation on the subject would be baseless and useless.”
That therefore it must have been that “Natural Selection”
selected itself; that “Nature has a power of Selection,” and is
more powerful than “feeble man.”
That there is “no limit to the amount of change in the
beauty and infinite complexity which may be effected in the long
course of time by “Nature's power of Selection ; ’” and this,
although Natural Selection, “spurns beauty,” and that if it did
not the whole of the (Darwinian) theory “must fall to the
ground.” - -
That Natural Selection is “a power necessarily ready for
action” upon a creature, and therefore Something outside it, and
no action of the creature itself. That the “action of Natural
Selection will depend on Some of the inhabitants becoming
slowly modified.” That “nothing can be effected unless favour-
able variations occur,” and variation itself is always a “slow
process.”
In other words, that everything is modified by Natural Selec-
tion, but that Natural Selection can modify nothing unless it be
already beginning to be modified; or, still more plainly, that
unless plants or animals begin to change, they never will be
changed.
31
That changes in the structure of animals, which imply and
involve an instinctive knowledge of the profoundest secrets of
Physiology, are effected in all creatures, while yet, as in the case
of a toad or an oyster, there is no intellect at all exercised in the
transmutation, nor any definite plan or object in view as to what
is to be attained to in the end.
That thus, from utter imbecility, and the most profound
ignorance, the highest wisdom and the greatest perfection of
strength are evolved by evolution—all that is wanted being
to give helplessness, ignorance, and nothingness time enough,
Wisdom and Power having had nothing whatever to do with the
“wonderful works" of Nature.
That for the formation of the most complex form it is not
necessary to know how to make it; which therefore does away
with the necessity of an All-wise Creator.
That Natural Selection, that is, the “sequence of events,” is
infinitely better adapted to the more complex “conditions of
life,” and of “far higher workmanship ’’ than anything man
can produce; causes, in fact, produced by results.
That though we see many “beautiful contrivances,” there
was no contriver, nor any intelligence presiding over the plan of
Nature, for all that Cuvier Says to the contrary.
That though, as Professor Phillips has said, the human mind
could not, even with the materials, have predicted the complete
arrangements we find in Such adaptations as the various kinds of
tails we find in the Falcons and the Swallows, the Woodpeckers
and the Divers, yet that the capability for the development of all
such must have existed in the monad.
That thus, they all come from it, as it did, ea; nihilo, one
by one, in the “sequence of events,” after innumerable billions
upon billions of failures, and so filled the world with the
wonders and beauties of creation, and So, all along, each kind of
creature came upon the Scene in pairs at the Same time, each
suited to the other.
That a book must be accepted as giving a true account of the
Origin of Species, though it gives no account whatever of the
origin of its imaginary origin, by Natural Selection, nor even
attempts or pretends to do so, Seeing that there could, by no
32
possibility, have been any Selection—nothing to select—nothing
to select from.
That containing, as it does, in one small-sized octavo volume,
no fewer than just 700 such expressions as “probably,” “I
believe,” “perhaps,” “we need not doubt,” &c., &c., it must be
accepted, without demur, as a masterpiece of Scientific argument,
as settling once and for ever what the whole world has been
in the dark about up to the date of its publication, and as doing
away with what has all along, till now, been accepted as a
Revelation from the DEITY.
That the “Origin of Species” went on the “principle of
Natural Selection with divergence of character ’’ in the first
Original Seed or germ, some “modification,” Some “develop-
ment " Some “plastic tendency,” Some “struggle for existence "
with itself, there being then no other to struggle with, and that
thus-both males and females selected themselves—and so down,
or up, and on, to man.
That Natural Selection effected the “survival of the fittest,”
and the “extermination" of the weakest ones, though there has
been no “survival,” but on the contrary, the “extermination ”
of the Mammoth, where skull alone, without the tusks, which
were nine feet long, weighed four hundred pounds; of the
Mastodon, the mightiest animal known to have lived; of the
Megatherium, that “great beast,” as Professor Sedgwick well
and wittily called it at the meeting of the British Association at
York—a monster clothed in “armour plate,” whose feet were a
yard in length; ” of the gigantic Dimotherium, no less than
eighteen feet in length ; of the Iguanodon, Seventy feet in
length, with jaws six feet in length, and containing a hundred
and eighty teeth; of the Plesiosaurus, of enormous size, with
the head of a bird, the teeth of a crocodile, the body of a Serpent,
the ribs of a chameleon, and the paddles of a whale.
That we must not ask, or at least must not expect an answer
if we ask, whether this last-named, or either of the others, came
by “Natural Selection ” from a fish, a reptile, or a beast, or
from all three at once.
That we must believe the same of birds, as to the “Survival”
of the strongest, though the marks of the footsteps and the egg
33
of an extinct bird have been found, which must have been twice
as large as an Ostrich.
That we must believe the same as to flying reptiles, though we
have before us the fossil remains of the Pterodactyle, an
enormous vampire, with a mouth like a crocodile, and which was
able either to swim, fly, or creep, or to hang by its claws
from trees. - -
That Buckland was utterly wrong when he said that all these
“ point to unity of purpose and deliberate design in some Intel-
ligent “Great First Cause,’ from which they were all derived.”
That Sir Charles Lyell was also utterly wrong, when
he said, while he was in his Sound mind, that each species
was “endowed at the time of its creation ” with its present
attributes. That influences of time and Space render species
unstable, though no extinct animal has ever existed for a longer
period of time than the Mammoth, nor ever any been more
widely dispersed, and that the character of the molar teeth
in it are positively the same both in the earliest known and the
most recent examples, its numbers too having been so vast that
two thousand of these teeth were dredged up on the coast of
Norfolk alone between the years 1820 and 1832, while the great
plains of Siberia are partly composed of them and of Sand, each
tooth weighing from 150 to 200 pounds, this quarry having
served the people with lime for five hundred years, besides an
export to Europe for upwards of an hundred, and the supply
being yet undiminished.
That we must “see no difficulty in a race of bears being
rendered, by Natural Selection, more and more aquatic in their
structure and habits, with larger and longer mouths, till a
creature was produced as monstrous as a whale;” so that as the
giraffe came from a fish, so did the whale from a bear—it being
easy for Natural Selection to fit any animal for any changed
habits whatever. * - -
We must believe all this, though it may, perhaps, be suggested
that if the bear was determined to live in the “dark unfathomed
caves” of the ocean, before he was quite fitted for it, he might
find that he was in rather a Sorry plight, and that he had been
led into a somewhat awkward mistake, not much to his benefit ;
C
34
or if, on the other hand, he had to wait above-borde till he was
fitted to go down below, he would fare but badly, and on very
“short commons” among the mountains and forests.
That though a demi-Semi-bear-cum-whale would be, perhaps,
an odd fish to look at, it is as easy for him to swallow the flies
as it is for men of science to swallow this theory. All that they
have to do being to believe in a bear swimming about with a
widely open mouth, thus catching, like the whale, insects in the
Water. *
That while the bear, or the buffalo, has been thus floating
under water for some hours at a time, with only his mouth out,
Natural Selection has been “at play,” and has had her eye on
him with a mind to his becoming this, that, or the other, as the
case may be. -
That Mr. Pritchard, the President of the Royal Astronomical
Society, exhibited the most lamentable short-sightedness when
he said that for the eye to form itself from darkness to light, it
must have been able to compute the distances of its refracting
surfaces, and to assign the proper law of density for the several
layers in their proper places, which would require the application
of a mathematical analysis, such as was never yet possessed by
a human geometrician; and that the mechanism required for
the instantaneous change of the forms and distances, and, in
one instance, the magnitude of its component parts, would
require a handicraft Such as has never yet been possessed by a
human mechanic; to say nothing of the knowledge of chemistry
required for the composition of the Several constituent media.
That we must not ask how the optic nerve happened to be so
exactly fitted to convey the vibration of the luminous ether,
which also happened so strangely to surround it, nor how there
came to be a concurrence of four conditions of things, each
utterly independent of the other, a nerve sensitive to light, a
non-reflecting pigment over it, a transparent medium investing
it, and a strange ether Surrounding the whole.
That there is here no evidence of the power of some One
Mind, Will, Forethought, and Contriver to select, arrange, and
controul, but that it must be taken for granted, that before the
eye in its present state was formed, there must have been a
35
“single rudimentary eye,” able, but only just able, to discern
light from darkness, but nothing else, Unde datum, not
stated.
That it came of a “thick layer of transparent tissue,” and
that thus from a supposed “optic” nerve, merely “coated with
pigment,” “Natural Selection ” has worked out an eye of some
24,000 lenses in an insect, and all varieties of numbers in them
and other creatures.
That only let this “process go on for millions on millions of
years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many
kinds, and may We not suppose that a living optical instrument
might be thus formed, as Superior to One of glass as the works
of the Creator are to those of man.”
That “thick layers of tissue” were manipulated,—in some
way or other, to produce this result, which all came of the
“nerve sensitive to light;” though what that nerve came from,
Natural Selection has not told us, but that it happened to be
just where it ought to be—in the head, and, at the same time, a
“space filled with fluid,” ready to hand, and all the while “a
power intently watching the process" in each “accidental
alteration ”—Natural Selection to wit ; but all accidental,
nothing of purpose.
That it was altogether a fortuitous proceeding, so that the eye
was the result of a series of accidents, going on in millions upon
millions of billions upon billions of years, and at the sacrifice of
a still greater number of lives in failures.
That we are to believe this, though the eye of one of the
Trilobite family has no fewer than 6,000 facets to each of its
eyes; the eyes perfect, “created in the fullness of perfection,”
to use the words of Buckland, or, “as perfect as possessed by
any of animal class,” in those of Darwin; and this, though its
fossil remains are found in the most ancient of all the forma-
tions, and which, therefore, in the words of Ansted, must have
been among the “earliest of created beings.”
That we must “see no difficulty” in all this by simply
“imagining,” by the “Use of the Imagination,” that it must
have been coming gradually to that state of perfection in billions
on billions of ages before the beginning. That is all.
36
That every single organised being around us lives by a
struggle at Some period of its life; that the “merest trifle
would often give the victory to one organised being over
another ;” that “if one species does not become modified and
improved in a corresponding degree with its competitor, it will
soon become exterminated ;” and this, though we see countless
kinds, such as the herring, a most defenceless creature, still
existing in inconceivably numerous multitudes, flourishing and
abounding beyond all thought of calculation, Overlooked, as it
would seem, by Natural Selection. -
That the extinct rhinoceros was more advantageously
organised than the existing one, so that it ought to have
“infallibly exterminated the inferior ones,” while we have it
before our eyes, that it did not do so, which, therefore, has an
ugly look about it. -
That “many ancient forms of life have been utterly lost,” so
that it is very convenient to “readily believe that the unknown
progenitor of the vertebrata possessed many vertebræ,” and that
as he could not have arranged them by Natural Selection, he
must have had them all at once, or he could not have had them
at all. -
That we are of the same descent with animals of the various
kinds, as proved by the number of our vertebrae, and also that
we are clearly of the same descent as birds, because of our
similitude to them in our imperfect condition before birth ; and
this, though birds have not the Same number of vertebrae as we
have.
That as we possess only the “last volume” of the Geological
Record, so that the difficulties in the way are “inexplicable,”
still we can make them “disappear” by the “Use of the Imagina-
tion,” although there are no traces of the existence of “infinitely
numerous extinct species”—the most obvious of the many
objections which may be urged against my views.”
That there must have been, and therefore were, an infinite
number of forms of the huge Elephant and the mighty Mam-
moth, though the remains of not one of them have ever been
found, as those of the most fragile and delicate shells are in the
low chalk,
37
That the remains of the horse and the tapir are found in the
Same formation, and that there must have been innumerable
links between them, though not one of them has ever been
found, Geology telling us truly all about the large and the small
genera, but nothing about all the intermediate species, which
nevertheless must have existed “Somehow,” somewhere, and
Somewhen.
That though certain animals cannot be found in any geological
formation before fixed periods,--which is fantamount to a high
probability that they never did exist in them,-yet that we must
believe that they did exist in them, as proved by negative
evidence (elsewhere asserted to be worthless).
That the Giraffe, once on a time, had no tail, not even the
rudiment of One, but in the process of numberless ages, one came
to grow by infinitesimal degrees, to its present length, to act as
a “flyflapper” to keep off the flies, though it had done without
one in all time before, the flies notwithstanding.
That “it certainly is not true that the new organs appear
Suddenly in any class,” so that if we could but have had had a
microscope of sufficient power, we might have discerned if only
the hundred thousand millionth part of such a tail, ab initio, in
the Giraffe.
That in like manner, and in like time, and by the like process,
it came by its present long neck, from desiring to browse on the
leaves of trees ; though elephants, horses, cows, and donkeys
feed on the same, but have done equally well without.
That the same must have been the case, mutatis mutandis,
with the trunk of the elephant, &c., &c. -
That “there is no such thing as species,” and that “all
varieties are in the act of becoming Species.”
That Natural Selection will, some time or other, cease from
her carnage of “extermination,” after the slaughter of infinite
millions beyond all power of imagination, or even of thought,
and that every plant and every animal will be perfect.
That there may be men with wings, or sirens, or Satyrs,
mermaids and dragons, centaurs and sphinxes, some or all of
them able to talk, and so forth, in the “sequence of events; ”
all brought about without any Designer, and without any plan,
38
That Sir Charles Lyell was quite wrong when he said that
“species have a real existence in Nature,” and that each was
“endowed at its creation ” with its present attributes, because,
as he added, “we must suppose that when the Creator of nature
creates an animal or plant, all the possible circumstances in
which its descendants are destined to live are foreseen.”
That he was also equally wrong when he held that the brain
in the young of an animal lends “no support whatever to the
notion of a gradual transformation of one species into another;”
least of all “from an animal of a more simple to one of a more
complex structure.” /*
That some male and female apes must have become simia-
multaneously endowed with the reason of man, to be his prede-
cessors; for, if not, the One that had such an element of reason
could not have consorted suitably with one that had not, and that
such pairs to become well matched, must have thus arisen con-
temporaneously, or there would have been a reversion to the
ancestral ape, which never, since the world began, could light a
fire, or cook its food, make a bow and arrow, or even a hoop,
much less calculate an eclipse, or discover the law of gravitation.
That we must believe this, though the dog or the elephant, to
Say nothing of the ant or the bee, exhibits far more of the
human character than the ape, and that there never yet has
been, and never can be, any friendship or communication
between man and ape such as there is with the dog, or even
the Wolf; and that the ape can never be trusted by man, or be
made useful to him, as the dog, the horse, the elephant, and
many other animals can.
That nevertheless we must be descended from the ape, though
the common bee closely resembles man in its classes, its govern-
ment, its laws, its public zeal, its loyalty, and its architecture, in
not one of which respects has the ape the remotest affinity
with him.
That our speech had its origin in the tones of the voices of
beasts and birds, so that we ought to screech like the gorilla,
instead of singing in the way we do.
That Mr. Pritchard was quite in the dark when said that he
could not understand how so complicated a structure as the eye
39
could possibly have been successively improved by any series
of accidental variations; for that if one of the surfaces of the
eye were to be altered, it could not possibly be improved, unless
the form of the other surface were to be at one and the same
time also altered in the same one only possible way—out of
millions—and all in obedience to an extremely complicated law
of optics; and that if an eye is altered for the better, in relation
to one set of circumstances, what is there to ensure that the
next set shall turn accidentally in the same direction towards
its ultimate perfection, and not away from it; and this uniform
action to go on for millions of billions of years; so that if it were
to be SO, there must be a bias in that direction, and that this
would indicate an “Intelligent Will” to give the bias, and to
make the circumstances all along concur with the variations in
the eye, Said to be accidental, so as to result ultimately in its
present perfection.
That, for all this, we must believe that there is no Supreme
Governor of the Universe, though Laplace has shewn by the
calculation of probabilities, that it is four millions to a unit that
the motions of the planets have been directed by a “First Great
Cause,” and nearly two millions to one that there was such,
rather than that the Sun will rise at a given moment of any
day.
That we must “see no difficulty” in believing ; on the other
hand, every such dream in the so-called “Origin of Species,”
though it must be admitted that the case of the eye is “more
than enough to stagger any man.”
That the shifting of the eye in the flounder from below to
above, as it grows, is the result of Evolution, not of Design, and
and that it came quite naturally in the “Sequence of events.”
That “Natural Selection cares nothing for appearances,” and
that “if it were that many structures have been erected for
beauty in the eyes of man or for mere variety, this doctrine, if
true, would be absolutely fatal to my (Darwin’s) theory,” and
yet, that we must “see no good reason to doubt " that when
males and females of any animal “differ in structure, colour, or
ornament, it has been produced by the admiration of the females
or the males for such in each other.”
40
That we must not “doubt that some domestic animals vary
less than others, yet that the variety or absence of distinct
breeds of the cat 1 the donkey ! goose ! etc., may be attributed
in main part to Selection not having been brought into play !”
though there can be no possible reason why it should not have
been, in their case, as well as in any or all others.
That the goose ! seems to have a “singularly inflexible organisa-
tion,” in fact was too much for Natural Selection.
That though Natural Selection “spurns beauty,” yet man
does appreciate it whether in form, colour, harmony, or any
other mode, although he has come from the monkey and other
lower forms, who have never had any such, so that Natural
Selection has “improved ” us by giving us that which she
ignored and despised in them.
That none of the beauties of creation were intended to please
the eye, or any other sense ; neither the colour of flowers, nor
their scents; nor the varied plumage of birds, nor their songs.
No, they are all fortuitous. They are one and all the results of
the “Sequence of events,” or of the “chapter of accidents,” but
not of any studied plan.
That, for instance, one peacock having, by Some lucky acci-
dent, come by a new feather of striking appearance, became at
Once an object of great attraction to all the lady birds about him,
So that the next eggs laid, hatched out an improved peacock.
That thus the beauty of all male birds is to be attributed to
the coquetry of the females, beginning with their admiration of
some eccentric feather till the whole plumage followed suit
accordingly—“fine by degrees, and beautifully more.”
That we must “see no good reason to doubt that female birds
by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melo-
dious or beautiful males to their standard of beauty, might
produce a marked effect.”
That we must not ask how the first bird came to this appre-
ciation of beauty in colour, when it has been laid down that if
Natural Selection did not ignore beauty, the whole theory of the
origin of species would “fall to the ground.”
That we must believe the same of butterflies with all their gay
colours, that they all came of the admiration of the females for
41
the males, no doubt, at some “Butterflies' Ball and Grass-
hoppers' Feast,” and this, though such numbers of them are as
plain as possible, all black or all white, and so on.
That we must account in a similar manner for the splendid
colours of numberless caterpillars, and then of chrsysalides, and
then of even the eggs, and that their beauty was brought about
by the admiration, in the first instance, for one of these by
another.
That Mr. Gould was utterly wrong where he says that the
“gorgeous colouring of the humming birds has been given them
for the mere purpose of ornament "–in other words, that
Ornament and beauty, merely as such, was the end proposed.
That, if so, would be “absolutely fatal” to the theory, and
the same appears to Sweet Sounds and Sweet scents. No, they
all came of and for no purpose whatever, and merely at random.
That every advantage secured to any creature by Natural
Selection, though never so small and infinitesimal as it may be
at the time, is secured to it for ever; and this although we see
every day the greatest advantage gained to men by habit and
practice, such as the most astonishing gift of touch to the blind,
and yet never inherited by their descendants, but ending with
those who had thus temporarily organised them, and that soit has
been with individuals, and even races, possessed naturally with
great beauty, great strength, and so on, and yet in no case
transmitted in perpetuity to those who came after them.
That Cuvier was utterly wrong when he laid it down as to
“every organised being ” that all their parts “correspond,” and
that “Inone of these parts can change without the whole
2
changing;” on the contrary, that all the correspondences
between the organisation of any creature, their instincts also,
must have been purely accidental, and all to be explained by the
“Sequence of events,” bringing on “beneficial changes '' in a
slight degree, and so on, and so on. W
That the bones in the arm of the monkey, the wing of the bat,
the fore leg of the horse, and the flipper of the seal, are not of
any “Special use to these animals,” but are only due to
“inheritance,” derived ab initio from the “Origin,” which we
“cannot doubt” held within it the “potential element” of all
42
creation, So as to “develop itself in the end into a crab, a
butterfly, and a tortoise, an Oak tree and a man; but that how
it came to have or acquired its double quality of animal and
vegetable, we must not enquire.
That during “wast, yet unknown periods of time, the earth
Swarmed with living creatures,” of which, though “not a vestige
or trace is to be found,” we must “believe this to be indispu-
table,” though, as just Said, “quite unknown.”
That all these and all others were derived from some one first
form, a mere “monad,” though “no one can at present say by
what line of descent the three higher and related classes, namely:
mammals, birds, reptiles, were derived from either of the two
lower vertebrate classes, namely: amphibians and fishes.”
That although in spite of an “enormous accumulation of
probabilities, we yet stand without the direct production of a
new species from a common stock,” yet, nevertheless, against
the evidence of our senses, we must believe that such has been
the case with all the so-called species in the World.
That so it has been in the countless past ages in the way of
metamorphosis, though we see that elephants have not yet been
turned into horses, nor bears into whales (though “very like ’’
them) nor ducks into Swallows, and that the ass, the gander,
and the goose still survive—the One to bray, and the other to
cackle, even as it did at the attack on the Capitol of Ancient
Rome.
That the American Ostrich “is not yet perfect,” though there
is no proof whatever of its being in the way to any supposed
perfection.
That humble bees are common in gardens, and Scarce else-
where in comparison, in consequence of their being preyed on by
field mice, which are kept down by cats about houses (which, in
fact, they are not, as they do not eat them) the truth being, as
every National Schoolboy knows, that these bees abound near
woods, or in any other uncultivated places, where thistles and
other wild flowers which bees are fond of, are found, a hundred-
fold more than they do in gardens, and that if they are found
more or less numerously in the latter, it is only because of these
having more flowers in them, for which they will fly for long
43
distances—it is said for miles—there being no more nests there
than anywhere else, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,
nothing like so many.
That “if Nature had to make” the bill of a pigeon short, each
young pigeon in every egg would be striving one with another,
which could come out soonest with the shortest and strongest
bill, and this, though, as it would take perhaps ten thousand
million years to make one such bill, the whole brood would have
been dead and gone thousands of millions of years before the
necessary degree of strength could be arrived at, to be of any
benefit to the race in all the meantime.
That tumbler pigeons have been produced by the long-
continued selection of such in many generations, though we
know not how they first began to have the habit, nor by whom
it was first observed and then propagated.
That “varieties” are as “steps leading to more strongly-
marked and more permanent varieties, and these latter leading
to sub-species, and so to species.” “Hence, I believe, that a
well-marked variety may be considered as an incipient species.”
That “one is apt to wonder why a distinct species should
have been created,” but “we see whole Series of animals which
have been created,” though the book on the “Origin of Species”
contradicts this from first to last, and utterly denies Creation ;
and this, while elsewhere it says that “one hand has only
worked through the Universe.”
That the book on the “Origin of Species” clears up the
“mystery of mysteries,” as it has been called by one of our
greatest philosophers, though “I have found to my cost a
constant tendency to fill up the gaps of knowledge by inaccurate
and superficial hypothesis.”
That it would be a “vain search '' to seek for the “essence of
the term—species,” though “good and distinct species " un-
questionably occur. - -.
That varieties “become ultimately converted into good and
permanent species,” which differ from each other far more than
do the varieties of the same species.”
That species are “permanent varieties, and that this is a
characteristic of species" that they thus always remain the
44
Same; for all the book on the “Origin of Species” says to the
exact contrary.
That thus permanency is an attribute of species, and not of
variety; so that for them to trouble themselves to diverge into
varieties would seem a useless thing.
That the Ostrich came from a bustard by using its legs more
and its wings less, till it got to have no wings at all to fly with ;
and that it must have gained by this loss, though we are not
told what ; and this while we see that the albatross and number-
less other birds which are constantly on the wing all the day
through, have never lost their legs by their disuse.
That in all such cases of “improvement’’ on previous
existences, the Original species is infallibly “exterminated;”
but that, nevertheless, bustards still exist.
That wingless birds came by degrees, by some “transitional
grade,” at first to “float along the surface of the sea,” and
“ultimately to rise from the surface and glide through the
air;” though how they managed to exist before they obtained
even the rudiments of wings does not appear, and we are not
told.
That a “well-developed tail” came to this or that “aquatic
animal" in the “Sequence of events,” after its having been
thousands of millions of years before (Natural Selection being
an exceedingly slow process) without any tail at all ; though a
fish without a tail must have been somewhat of an odd fish, one
would think.
That every “well-developed tail” in a water animal has been
“worked in ’’ as a fly-flapper for land animals, or as a “pre-
hensile instrument,” or to “help them in turning,” though We
see that in the dog it is apparently of no such use at all, and
that the hare can double well enough, even marvellously quickly,
though with hardly any tail.
That long tails are necessary to animals in hot countries, to
give them the power of resisting the attacks of insects; although
we see that sheep have heavy tails, which they cannot, and do
not make use of for any such purpose, and are especially
attacked by flies on their heads, which, if their tails were ever
so light, they could not possibly reach.
45
That as we are told to believe that the Swim-bladder in
creatures of the sea is modified into lungs in their descendants
changed into land animals, So the tail, having been so useful to
the former as a means of locomotion, still proves its origin in the
latter, though of so little use to them. -
That, therefore, “there seems no great difficulty in believing
that the swim-bladder in fishes,” though “originally constituted
for one purpose,” has been “actually converted ” into a “lung
or organ used exclusively for Fespiration.”
That so it was, before “their tails were formed,” that in
process of time, these tails might “come to be worked in " for
all sorts of purposes in a land animal, and that thus, e.g., the tail
of a shark might come to be “worked in ’’ for the tail of a cow,
and that of a herring for that of an ass!
That man has existed upon the prehistoric earth in all So-
called time of “inconceivable duration,” though it has never
yet been filled and over-filled with men upon it for ages enough
before the present.
That the proportion throughout the whole of Nature between
males and females is very Wonderful, and though quite unac-
countable, the credit of it must be given to the “sequence of
events.”
That the Pyramids were built on the mud of the Nile, deposited
at a very slow rate, though the fact is that it is being deposited
in enormous quantities in a very short space of time.
That the horse was famed 19,387 years ago, though history
relates that it was not introduced into AEgypt till the reign of
the Shepherd Kings.
That Religion is a novelty, though in the “Book of the Dead,”
perhaps the oldest book in the world, the future life is clearly
spoken of, as well as the doctrine of a future state of rewards
and punishments, and though the Sphinx, “The Father of
Terror,” has looked out over a range of temples, to which it
belonged, in the desert, with its “cold impassive face,” unmoved
by the wreck and ruin of the old world, age after age; and
though it is shown that Horus was, in those ancient days, a
type of the Resurrection, as Osiris restored to life by Isis—
a symbol from the sun setting down in darkness and rising up
46
again in glory; and though the Papyrus Prisse, in the Royal
Library of Paris, contains some excellent principles of morality,
Written between 3,300 and 3,400 years B.C.
That we must “see no difficulty in Natural Selection pre-
Serving and accumulating variations of instinct to any extent
that was profitable,” and that thus “all the most complex and
Wonderful instincts have originated;” so that once on a time,
bees can have had no such instincts as they now have, nor
ants, nor migratory birds—Natural Selection at that remote
date not having been “called into play.” I (By whom 2 or by
what?)
That thus the Spider must have been without the instinct
which now prompts it to spin its web, and so must have been
without the habits it now has, without its spinnerets or its legs,
which would then have been useless, and, therefore, without the
power of catching insects to live on.
That carnivorous animals were not designed to keep down
others; that birds were not intended to be made for living in
trees; nor fishes in the Sea ; nor insects to act the various parts
they do; nor the plants of the earth created to be food for men
and animals; but, that all are the results of blind chance acting
at random through incalculable ages of failures, the present end
being at last luckily hit on, all the predecessors of existing
creatures having been “exterminated ” in the process, as afore-
Said ; that Design could have had nothing to do with the results,
there having been no Designer ; but that they all came from
nothing in the “Sequence of events.”
That dogs rarely require, when young, to be taught not to
attack sheep, though it is the very commonest thing that some can
never be broken off the habit, and that there is not a dog in
existence that might not, at Once, be taught to bring out the
latent instinct to hunt.
That “Natural instincts are lost under domestication,” though
the preceding fact stares us in the face to the exact contrary,
showing us that they are, at the most, but dormant, and ready
to be restored to their former fulness.
That chickens have lost, by habit, the fear of dogs and cats,
though there can be no proof that they ever had such.
47
That the cuckoo, once upon a time, did not lay her eggs in
other bird's nests, but acquired the habit by degrees.
That we must believe that the “Origin of Species '' is right,
and all the world else wrong, though its author admits that he
is open to the charge of having an “overweening confidence in
his own wisdom,” which makes him “not admit that such wonder-
ful and well-established facts at once annihilate his theory;” and
though he cannot pretend that the facts given (in chapter seven)
strengthen in any degree his theory, and that he can only Say
that “they do not annihilate it "–ergo, it is thus proved.
That the sterility of hybrids is no disproof of the theory of
Natural Selection, which is, that it acts for the good of the
creatures which exercise it, although it could not be of any
possible advantage to the Several animals, and though the “im-
portance of this fact has been much underrated by Some writers,”
and though its theory does not “go to the root of the matter,”
and “no explanation is offered " of the main fact,
That we must “suspect " that an “occasional intercross with
a distinct individual is a law of nature,” “though there are, on
this view, many cases of difficulty.”
That all the same, no account need be taken of the prodigious
amount of difference between the fertile and sterile individuals
of many insects,” nor of a “climax of the difficulty’ beyond
all the rest, some of the neuters differing even from each other
to an almost “incredible degree;” some “with jaws and
instincts extraordinarily different,” and others with forms, “the
use of which is quite unknown, nor of the fact that, “how the
workers have been made sterile, is a difficulty.”
That it must have been that two creatures were “worked out”
for each other, as the theory would break down if only one
individual were to elaborate a tail, or a wing, as the case might
be, in any number of millions of ages.
That, though all the lower forms have been advanced, it was
not necessary for them to be so, for “what advantage" would it
be to them now, as, for instance, for a Swallow to be turned into
a snail, or an antelope transmuted into a frog; and the same
with the “bears,” “Ostriches,” “logger-headed ducks,” and all
the rest of them.
48
That they all have been changed by Some accidental benefits,
and that though each of the lowest animals in the Scale has a
“really wondrous organisation” at the present day, yet the
“ Use of the Imagination ” can do what it likes with them.
That the “modified offspring from the more highly improved
branches in the line of descent will, it is probable, often take the
place of, and so destroy, the earlier and less improved branches;”
though we are not told what is meant by “improving” animals,
nor when an animal is less “improved ” than it ought to be,
for “who will pretend that he knows the history of any organised
being sufficiently well to Say whether any particular change
would be to its advantage 2"
That we must believe, for all that, that the ultimate result
will be that each creature will tend to become more and more
improved in relation to its condition in life; and this, though
we see that the lower forms have not been “exterminated” by
the improved ones, but that both live close together in innu-
merable forms, without the slightest tendency to such imaginary
improvement—the horse and the ass, for instance.
That a better architect would have given animals more useful
limbs, and that the works of Nature might be vastly improved
upon ; and this, though we see that, even as it is, a horse can
gallop a mile in a minute ; a monkey can climb from bough to
bough in a most surprising manner, and a seal glide through the
water in a marvellous way—the similarity of its structure to that
of those and others being no manner of hindrance to it.
That the ancestor of the Seal had not a flipper, but a foot
with five toes, and that we may “further venture to believe"
that the several bones in the limbs of the monkey, the horse,
and the bat, were of more use to their common ancestor than they
are to themselves.
That our own ancestor's arms and legs were of more special
use to him than they are to us, but that Nature has done the
best she could for us under existing circumstances.
That, therefore, the machinery of our bodies has been deterio-
rating as to practical use, and, as to their being for special use
to us, they have rather retrogaded as to that, so far as we are
concerned. That though We are —we must be—improved upon
49
apes, we, nevertheless, must allow that we have deteriorated in
our limbs from them and our unknown ancestors, whose history
is lost in the mists of antiquity.
That principles of virtue must have come to men in the
“sequence of events,” or otherwise he could not have had them
at all, and as every improved species always has “exterminated ”
every previous unimproved one, it follows that virtuous men
must have exterminated all who were not so lucky as to be
virtuous.
That although the remains of the horse existed in geological
strata of “enormous antiquity,” long before any indications of
the existence of man have yet been found,-and although those
remains show that the horse and the ass at that remote period
exactly resembled in nearly every respect the horse and the ass
which now run wild in many parts of Asia and Africa, and
although, “going still further back to the Upper Miocene period,
the horse is still found with its present peculiarities, and the
two differ from each other only in minute details,”—yet as the
remains of the hipparion or “little horse” are found in the
Same deposit as the horse, namely, the Upper Miocene, so that
it could not have been its ancestor, though like it in several
respects, and as the remains of the anchotherium are only found
in the lower Miocene, so that there is a wider gap between it and
the hipparion than between the latter and the horse; still, for
all that, inasmuch as in the anchotherium the leg bones are
still more separated, as it has three bones on the fore limb,
which “theory requires that it should have,” (!) “it being
impossible to obtain evidence more complete in kind than this
of the origin of the horse"—ergo, the horse is descended from
the anchotherium.—Q. E. D. (Huayley.)
That horses have sometimes been born with extra toes—ergo,
the “horse must at one time have had the leg and foot bones
complete, although they were blotted out before the horse was
turned into a perfect running machine !” (Huayley.)
That the Darwin Doctrine, therefore, being THUS (!) “made
out in this one case of the horse,” it is strong evidence that
“similar modifications have taken place in all cases!” (Huayley.)
That though slight crosses benefit the offspring, greater
T)
50
crosses, i.e., those of widely separated species, produce sterile
hybrids, although we see that the widely different forms of the
pigeon among birds, and the cabbage and other varieties among
plants, are productive together, while other species, “though
resembling each other most closely, are utterly sterile when
crossed,” and the former is “almost invariably the case.”
That the “imperfection of the geological record,” showing no
regular chain of species, and so giving no proof of the theory,
and therefore the most obvious and gravest objection that can be
urged against it, must, nevertheless, be assumed as conclusively
proving it. -
That it is a sufficient answer to the question—what has
become of the innumerable forms which must have existed
before the Silurian deposit, that “ long before that ” the world
“may have " then “presented a totally different aspect;” that
the older continents “may ” now “all be in a metamorphosed
condition,” or “may ” lie buried under the ocean ;” that there
has “probably" been more extinction of species during the
periods of subsidence, and that the duration of each formation
was “perhaps ' short compared with the average duration of
Specific forms.
That although the Mosaic account of the Creation is borne
out by the “Testimony of the Rocks” in a most wonderful
manner, yet, as it does not suit the newfangled Darwinian
theory, it cannot possibly be true, and we must not believe a
WOrd of it.
That if ever there was such a person as Moses, the five books—.
called the five books—of Moses were none of his at all, but a
mere compilation of some impostor or victim of delusion.
I believe that no one who believes in the Bible has any sense
or wisdom in accounting for the Creation of the World and all
the creatures in it.
That Darwin's is a much more valuable opinion, and much
more to be received than that of Humboldt, who said of Strauss,
“what displeases me in him is the scientific levity which causes
him to see no difficulty in the organic springing from the
inorganic, nay, man himself, from the Chaldaean mud.”
That the “Great Unknown,” having limbs of such special
51
use to him, ought to have come off conqueror in the “struggle
for existence,” but it seems to have been all the other way, and
the favoured animal was “exterminated ” and the inferior
perpetuated. -
That the “indefinite repetition ” of the same part or organ is
the common characteristic of all “low or little modified forms,”
and therefore we may readily conclude that the unknown
progenitor of the vertebrata “possessed many vertebræ,” though
it militates rather against this dictum that said ancient
Incognito, had limbs of more use to him than those of his
descendants, the horse, Seal, bat, and monkey, are to them, and
yet that he was a “low and little-modified form.”
That Nature does nothing “by leaps,” and that every separate
part of every animal is the result of Natural Selection in the
inconceivably vast allowance of time asked for the theory,
although this flatly contradicts the statement that the ancestor
of the vertebrata put in an appearance with many vertebræ
ready-made.
That as the ancestor of the vertebrata had a great many
vertebrae to begin with ; he must have been the first, and could
therefore have had no vertebrated animal before him ; or, in
other words, was created. We must not ask whether it may not
have been in like manner that the ancestor of the birds had
feathers, he of the fishes had Scales, and So on.
That the fore and hind legs of the vertebrata and articulate
classes are homologous, but the middle legs of insects are not so,
that they, therefore, have no business where they are, but are
mere interlopers, - --
That the bear, “with his mouth open to catch flies,” as before
said, was the immediate ancestor of the whale, though the bear
has hind feet very useful to him, while the whale, though it has
fins or paddles in the place of hands, is absolutely without even
the analogues of the hinder limbs.
That the bat was not so created at first, but was “worked
out ’’ of some other form in the usual way, that it had at first a
body without wings, Small or large, just as bats are now, or
wings without a body.
52
That they were formed to live on insects, but that how
they managed to catch them is not easy to say, but that they did
the best they could; that they only can live from foot to mouth
now, so that they must have been much worse off then, but
by degrees their fore hands began to lengthen, and then their
wings. That as they lost their fore feet, and before they got
their wings, they must have been in rather a bad way, for it is
clear they could neither run nor fly, that myriads of them must
have succumbed to the process in untold ages but those that
somehow or other lived on in the quarter or half-state, and the
intermediate stages, “exterminated ” all competitors.
That the like to this is the natural history of every other
species of living creature, mutatis mutandis. That no doubt the
animals in transition must have perished, being neither one
thing nor the other, and of course those which had no beneficial
change must have perished also for want of it, and that “if it
had been asked how an insectivorous quadruped could possibly
have been converted into a flying bat, the question would have
been far more difficult, and I could have given no answer;” yet,
“such difficulties have little weight.”
That dogs preying on hares and rabbits, the rabbits became
scarce and the hares increased. Then the dogs would try to
catch more hares and the dogs “with slightly plastic limbs "
(for which we must beg the whole question) would be “slightly
favoured,” and so would live longer and Survive through a
scarcity of food, and would also have more young with a
tendency to inherit these advantages. Yes, “I See no reason to
doubt that these causes would in a thousand generations produce
a marked effect, and adapt the form of the dog to catching
hares.” And this, though Professor Owen says, that “this
condition of things, if followed out to its full consequences,
seems only to tend to an eactinction of species, for when the
hares were all destroyed, the long-legged dogs would perish; at
most there could be but a reversion to the first form and
condition.” That Professor Owen may argue in this way if
he likes. “Who shall decide when doctors disagree ?” As to
the short-legged dogs and what would become of them in one
generation, not to Say in a thousand all we must say is, “Love
me, love my dog-ma.”
53
That as to birds, it took untold ages to make the first bird out
of what not ? That the process began at first somewhere or
other, though we know not where. One new form succeeded
another in untold profusion for a few hundred millions of ages
more or less, each form becoming more and more like a true bird
till at length, after the slaughter of more than as many hundred
millions of them, a bond fide cock and hen were hatched the
product of the admiration of innumerable ancestors, in the
“Sequence of events.”
That the green colour of the green woodpecker is due to
Selection by the male or female bird, because we see that there
are black and pied woodpeckers also.
That it is not the case that many structures have been created
for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety, although we
must “fully admit that many structures are of no direct use to
their possessors.”
That there is no “logical impossibility in the acquirement of
any conceivable degree of perfection through Natural Selection.”
That the “electric organs of fishes" have been produced by
“Natural Selection,” although it is “impossible to conceive by
what steps those wondrous organs have been produced;” and
this, although these organs only occur in species “widely remote
in their affinities,” while we “might have expected ” (on
Darwinian grounds), that they would all “have been specifically
related to each other.” That we must believe the same in the
like cases of luminous insects.
That the most simple parts of Species are due to Natural
Selection, although their “importance does not seem sufficient
to cause the preservation of Successively varying individuals.”
I believe, I repeat again and again, “How do we know that it
would be any advantage for the lower forms to be more highly
organised ?”
That every animal, bird, plant, &c., are one and all striving
and “struggling” with and against each other “for existence,”
and that Natural Selection is looking on with fell pleasure at the
destruction of all the weakest, which must go to the wall; and
this, though we see, year after year, the same beautiful flowers
as before, Snowdrops, primroses, violets, cowslips, and bluebells;
54
hear the same sweet notes of the birds, and see them build the
same wonderfully constructed nests that they did of yore ; listen
to the cry of the cuckoo as ever of old, and note the instincts
of the various animals. For all this, “that all Organic beings are
striving to seize on each place in the economy of Nature.” “To
be or not to be, that is the question.”
And this, though we see the Smaller and the smallest birds
maintaining their numbers as of yore—the wren and the robin,
the thrush and the blackbird, the Swallow and the dove, and So
on through all Creation; and yet that every creature that does not
change must be expunged from the page of Nature. That we
must not expect an answer to the question, if the “Origin
of Species” is “by means of Natural Selection,” what is the
origin of Natural Selection, and where it exists? or of “favoured
races,” by whom or by what it is they are favoured ? except that
any effect may be produced without an existent cause. -
That Locke lays it down that want of proof is one of the
“causes of error,” but what of that ?
That “new forms ” are continually being produced; that
unlimited time “might” have produced them—ergo, it has been
SO. That there must have been such unlimited time, as begged
by the theory, and consequently the case is proved.
That the “non-inheritance of any character is, in fact, the
same thing as reversion to the character of the grand-parents or
remote ancestors, and no doubt this tendency to reversion may
often have checked or prevented the action of Natural Selection.”
That “it inevitably follows that as new species are formed
through Natural Selection, others will become scarce or finally
extinct.” And this, though we and all other animals seem
to continue as we and they were since the day they were
created, and that elephants, horses, lions, tigers, and all the rest
do not change into one another, nor can we point to a single one
in the process of changing.
That by Natural Selection a bustard, as before said, becomes
changed into an ostrich, a horse into Some other animal, and so
on, because we see that man has created many hereditary
varieties, such as the different kinds of dogs, and though these
are only varieties, as is proved by their breeding together, their
55
nature not being changed, but having a tendency to reversion,
the notion must not be given up, groundless as this shows
it to be.
That the Several Species of a genus “must have proceeded
from the same source, as they had descended from the same
‘progenitor,’” although “undoubtedly there are many cases of
extreme difficulty in understanding how the same species could
possibly have migrated from some one point to the several
distant and isolated points where now found,” as “we find not a
single animal common to Europe and Australia and South
America?” though the conditions of life are the same, and
though they have “descended from the same progenitor, and as
they can’t have migrated, they must have been Separately
created, as we must not believe that continents “which are now
quite separate have been continuously or almost continuously
united with each other ”; so that we must not “for a moment
pretend that any explanation could be afforded of many such cases.”
That if an animal has more than one habit, it is a proof
that it is in the “transitional grade,” So that as a dog Sometimes
eats grass, it clearly shows that, in due time, he will turn into
an ox; and just in the same way as the reindeer sometimes
devours the hamster, so he is sure to turn into one or another
of the carnivora, though we cannot at present exactly say which,
That Natural Selection is “a power incessantly ready for
action ” upon a creature, and therefore Something outside it, and
not as one would think, that it is plain that it is nothing but
the working of the creature itself.
That unless this or that creature gains any chance advantage,
nothing can come of it, viz.: that unless advantages be gained
they cannot be gained.
That it is an able and philosophical argument that the misle-
toe may metaphorically l be said to “struggle” with other fruit-
bearing plants in order to tempt birds to devour them, and thus
disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants—as if they
did not feed on the seeds of all other kinds. !
That the Darwin theory is right, though it is allowed that
according to it “all nature” Ought to be “in confusion,” instead
of the creatures being, as we see them, “well defined.”
56
That the eye of every living creature was produced by Natural
Selection, although in some species it consists of 4,000 lenses,
in others 12,000, 17,000, or 25,000, and in others of various
other vast numbers, though the “case of the eye is more than
enough to stagger any man.” (Darwin.)
That the cuckoo “once upon a time ’ did not lay her eggs in
other birds' nests, but has acquired the habit by degrees—some
old bird or other profiting by the mistake, or the young being
made stronger by it, viz.: by being trained by a foster-parent
instead of by their natural One ! and this, though we see that
Various other species occasionally lay their eggs in other birds'
nests, and yet have acquired no such habit.
That Some “original tissue" which was “vaguely sensitive
all over,” came by degrees to be “differentiated ” into man.
That the ant and the penguin, the hog and the Swallow, the
Camel and the kingfisher, the porpoise and the bat, are, one and
all, as well as ourselves, “joined together by family ties,”
though from what one common ancestor they spring is utterly
unknown.
That our having all this mixed blood in our veins may,
perhaps, answer for the different dispositions we see in ourselves,
That there “must " have been some ancestor of that most
curious creature the Trilobite, which “probably differs from any
known animal,” long before the beginning, though it, by all
accounts, seems to have been unique, and to have had its origin
in itself.
That the theory of Natural Selection is right, and that every
one who does not hold it is in the wrong, although the difficul-
ties “are so grave, that to this day I can never reflect on them
without being staggered.” (Darwin.)
That man, and all the animals, birds, fishes, reptiles, and
insects in the world have descended from one single original,
and not each one of these from an ancestor of its own kind;
that the gnat and the elephant, the cat and the mouse, the bat
and the butterfly, the whale and the ant, the toad and the
Swallow, the hare and the tortoise, the crocodile and the lamb,
the humming bird and the Snake, the mole and the monkey,
and then the man, are all one species—and only one.
57
And this, although we see that while animals of the Several
species described by naturalists breed solely together, and that
their offspring are prolific, in like manner, generation after gen-
eration, any others which may exceptionally breed together have
no progeny, except in very rare cases, and that any they may
have leave no descendants, except still more rarely for perhaps
one further generation or SO.
That all the various creatures on the earth have thus sprung
from a single parent, although I hold that each new species has
“supplanted and easterminated its original parent and all the
transitional varieties between its past and present status.”
(Darwin.)
That the drooping of the ears in domestic animals is due to
the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animals not being
much alarmed by danger, although I see the horse with erect
ears, and the hare and rabbit with strikingly drooping ears.
That the temporary variation of several races of any one
species of plant is a proof that permanent So-called species are
thus produced, although we see that the varieties if left for many
generations in a poor Soil would to a large extent by degrees,
and in the end wholly, revert to the form of the wild aboriginal
stock.
That the theory is right, although I allow that according to it
“all nature "ought to be “in confusion '' instead of the species
being, as we see them, “well defined.” (Darwin.)
“That to secure their visits" (i.e., those of insects) “they
dress themselves up in gay colours to draw attention, except
when the visitors they expect are night-flying moths, in which
case they prefer to robe in virgin white, which is most readily
seen through darkness,” though this is mere fancy and the very
reverse of fact.
That the organs of sight in insects are the same as our own,
of which no proof whatever is offered, and no doubt they are
wonderfully different, and on this his fact is the very opposite
of fact, for while on a fine Summer evening we see moths in
numbers hovering at the blossoms of the deep coloured lily, and
many other such, as for instance, even the nettle and the bur-
dock, it is only very rarely, Scarcely ever in comparison, that we see
58
One flying to the Snow-white pink, the whitest rose, or the palest
Sweet-pea. Nay, not only that far more moths will come to
Sugar Set as a trap for them than to various flowers in the neigh-
bourhood, but as every entomologist knows, the darker coloured
the Sugar, the more the moths are attracted to it. Thus, even
the monarch of the forest, the Purple Emperor butterfly, is
drawn down from his imperial throne on the top of the highest
Oak in the wood to the darksome bait thus set for him on the
ground, though hid completely from his sight by the foliage that
comes between him and it.
So much for the Organs of sight; now for those of scent.
That plants reserve, as if of purpose and intention their
strongest odours till the evening, for the attraction of their
nightly visitors, though it is not pleasant odours alone that are
stronger in the evening than in the day time, but others that are
of a very contrary nature, as we all of us know full well. And,
moreover, that these all are stronger before rain than at any
other time, just as Sounds are then more distinctly and distantly
heard, thus proving that it is some alteration in the state of the
atmosphere that makes the scent of flowers at such times stronger,
and not any actual change in their scent itself, still less any
intentional action on their part.
(All this “use of the Imagination of Science” is most mis-
leading to those who have not had knowledge or thought of such
facts as these themselves, and who then too readily Swallow all
that is offered to them, if only it be presented in a sufficiently
dogmatic manner.)
As mentioned already, there are in Darwin's single volume
no fewer than just 700 such scientific remarks as the following:
“we can understand; we can plainly see; as it seems to me;
“would be more likely; in my view ; we might expect ; if we
“admit ; on this view we can see ; we can clearly see; I
“cannot believe; I see no good reason; I cannot doubt; I
“believe; probably ; might become ; probably may have been ;
“we may feel certain; we may look; almost implied.”
It reminds one of the old School-Saying,
“If ‘ifs' and ‘ans' were pots and pans,
“There would be no work for tinkers’ hands.”
Did the good man think that we are simpletons, to be be-
fooled by such trifling as this l And it is with it, and such as
59
it, a “Scientific ’’ book, forsooth !—that our “professors ” and
“men of Science” would, if they could, beguile Believers, and
overturn Religion -- * -
Yes, this is the book that has been belauded and bepraised,
tlSque ad nauseam, by our “philosophers ” and “professors,”
SO styled and so dubbed among themselves, as if built upon the
most elaborate argumentation, and perfectly unanswerable !
This is the book that has been the will-o'-the-wisp that has
led away the weak-minded into the Slough of Despond of a
shallow and contemptible Infidelity.
But, Magna est Veritas, et provalebit !
Shades of Aldrich, and of Whately, of Bacon, and of Euclid,
of Newton, and of Butler, can you rest in your graves 2
There seems no limit to the idle phantasies of a disordered
brain, such as those of which I have spoken.
We must be ready to believe, anything—like the Infidel of
old—provided only it is not in the Bible.
Truly it is time that these crude notions were consigned to
the tomb of all the Capulets.” One “philosopher,” or “pro-
fessor,” Self-dubbed, makes unlimited use of the “Imagination
in Science,” and forthwith propounds some outrageous extrava-
gancy. He obtains notoriety, and so “draws away disciples
after him,” to follow the fate of Theudas of old, and in due time
to be “brought to nought.”
Is there anything too extravagant to be put forth as worthy
of acceptance if only it be asserted in the name of Science
This puerile nine-days wonder must run its course, I suppose,
like all other nine-days wonders; but the “Use of the Imagi-
nation in Science,” to the most fantastic and extravagant extent,
Will never, in the long run, be able to stand against the A B C
of common sense.
We may well say of it as was in its way said by Madame
Roland of “Tiberty,” O Science, what nonsense is written in
thy name !”
This much for Darwin and his delusions.
“O ye fools, when will ye understand?......He that made the
EYE : Shall. He not see 1”—Psalm Xciv. 8, 9.
POSTSCRIPT.
It was said by a witty Frenchman of some one who had sense enough
to keep the working of his brain to himself, “He keeps so long silent that
one actually supposes he has something to say ; a mistake we could never
fall into if he would but speak.”
It is a pity that our wiseacre philosophers have not followed so good
an example.
Their whole baseless fabric has been one huge “imposture,” to use the
word of Sedgwick, from the beginning to the end, from the monad to the
man. To treat the ridiculous lucubrations, wild assumptions, transparent
fallacies, senseless Sophisms, and most egregious follies of the miserable
Infidelity of their wretched system seriously, is to dignify it with an honour
of which it is utterly unworthy,
That this is not speaking too strongly, let the opinions of the men of
eminence which I have placed on the first pages of this edition suffice.
Here are a few specimens of the way they “darken counsel by words
without knowledge”—
I will set them side by side with a few verses from the Book of Job,
LOOK ON THIS PICTURE
“WORDS OF THE WISE.”
Canst thou by searching find out God 2
canst thou find out the Almighty unto
perfection ?
But ask now the beasts, and they shall
teach thee: and the fowls of the air, and
they shall tell thee.
Who knoweth not in all these that the
hand of the Lord hath wrought this?... .
In whose hand is the soul of every living
thing, and the breath of all mankind.
There is a path which no fowl knoweth
and which the vulture's eye hath not seen.
The lion's whelps have not trodden it,
nor the fierce lion passed it.
He puttieth forth. His hand upon the
rock; He overturneth the mountains by the
roots.
He cutteth out rivers among the rocks;
and His eye seeth every precious thing. .
He bindeth the floods from Overflowing:
and the thing that is hid bringeth He forth
to light.
Will the Unicorn be willing to serve thee,
or abide by thy crib. *
Canst; thou bind the unicorn with his
band in the furrow 2 or will he harrow the
Valleys after thee ? w
Wilt, thou trust him, because his
strength is great 2 or wilt; thou leave thy
labour to him 2 - º
Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring
home thy seed, and gather it into $hy barn ?
Hast thou given the horse strength 2 hast
thou clothed his neck with thunder ?
Cainst thou make him afraid as a gra.SS-
hopper ? the glory of his nostrils is terrible.
f{e paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in
his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed
Iſlell.
He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted;
neither turneth he back from the SWOrd.
AND ON THAT 1.
WORDS OF THE QUiseacres.
“Evolution is a change from indefinite
incoherent homogeneity to a definite co-
herent heterogeneity, through continuous
differentations and integrations. Life is a
COntinuous adjustment of internal relations
to external relations.”—H. SPENCER.
(“The Apostle of the understanding !”)
TYNDALL.
“Mental phenomena are the subjective
aS part of the functions of sensory and motor
Substrata, and in the last analysis, mental
phenomena, however complex, should be re-
ducible to correlation with the activity of
Certain Simple motor and sensory elements,
their accompaniments and combinations.”
DR. FERRIER.
“Dreaming and Waking are related as
Species and genera. Immer work has brought
cells into unstable equilibrium, and excita-
bility may easily become excitation. When
the Work of repair is not dome, the slight
Stimulus of the sleeping state is not sufficient
to rouse them. When it is done, the almost
Spontaneous activity of rested cells easily
raises their processes above the threshold of
consciousness.”—STAVELEY HALL.
“Man originated ” by “evolution;” “Life
is the potentiality of atoms;” “Mind is a
correlation of magnetic and psychic forces.”
“What little I know about the matter
leads me to think that if M. Comte had
p0SSessed the slightest acquaintance with
biological Science, (Philosophers disagree, it
Seems) he would have turned his phraseology
wpSide down, and have found that we can
have no knowledge of the great laws of life,
except that which is based upon the study of
7tatural living beings.”—HUx LEY.
“If there is one thing clear (clear !) about
the progress of modern science, it is the
tendency to reduce all Scientific problems
61
The quiver rattleth against him, the
glittering spear and the Shield.
He swalloweth the ground with fierce-
ness and rage : neither believeth he that it is
the sound of the trumpet.
He sayeth among the trumpets, Ha, ha :
and he smelleth the battle afar off, the
thunder of the captains, and the Shouting.
But where shall wisdom be found 2 and
where is the place of understanding 2
Man knoweth not the price thereof;
neither is it found in the land of the living.
“It cannot be valued with the gold of
Ophir, with the precious Onyx, or the
sapphire.”
The goid and the crystal cannot equal
it ; and the exchange of it shall not be for
jewels of fine gold.
The Topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal
ºneither shall it be valued with pure
, £OICl.
g Whence then cometh wisdom ? and
where is the place of understanding.
Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all
living, and kept close from the fowls of
the air.
Destruction and death say, We have
fleard the fame thereof With Our ears.
For He looketh to the ends of the earth,
and seeth under the Whole heaven ;
To make the weight for the winds; and
He weigheth the waters by measure.
When He made a decree for the rain,
and a way for the lightning and thunder.
And unto man. He said, Behold, the fear
of the Lord, that is Wisdom; and to depart
from evil is understanding.
except those which are purely intellectual to
questions of molecular physics, that is to say,
to the attractions, repulsions, motions, and
co-ordination of the alternate particles of
matter. Social phenomena are the result of
the inter-action of the complements of
Society, or men with one another in the
Surrounding universe. But in the language
of physical science, which by the nature of
the case is materialistic, the actions of men,
So far as they are recognisable by science, are
the results of molecular changes in the
matter of which they are composed.”
HUXLEY.
“To a certain extent indeed it may be
said, that imperfect Ossification of the verte-
bral column is of an embryonic character,
but on the other hand it would be extremely
incorrect to Suppose that the vertebral
columns of the older vertebrata are, in any
sense, embryonic, in their whole structure.”
HUXLEY.
“Matter and spirit are both names for
the imaginary Substrata of groups of natural
phenomena.”—HUXLEY.
“In itself it is but of little moment,
whether we express the phenomena of
matter in terms of Spirit, or the phenomena.
of spirit in terms of matter.”—HUXLEY.
“The extension of the province of what
we call matter or causation, and the con-
comitant gradual banishment from all regions
of human thought, of what we call spirit and
spontaneity.”—HUXLEY.
“Traced back to its earliest state, the
matter arises as the man does, in a particle
of nucleated protoplasm.”—HUXLEY.
well did Sir Walter Scott declare of the Holy Bible —
“Within this awful volume lies
The mystery of mysteries.
Happiest they of human race,
To whom their God has given grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch, to force the way,
And better had they ne'er been born,
Than read to doubt, or read to SCOrn.”
“The fool hath Said in his heart there is no God.”—PSALM xiv. 5.
“Answer a fool according to his folly.—PROVERBS xxvi. 5,
There is a very close connection between the monstrous absurdities of
Darwinism and the cowardly cruelties of the perpetrators of Experiments on
Living Animals.
And well there may be, when one of these self-dubbed “deep thinkers,”
Huxley, of “Bathybius” notoriety—thus sapiently delivered himself of his
opinion on the subject ; that there is “a good deal to be said '' for the
“hypothesis” that animals are “mere machines,” “as much so as if they were
mills or steam-engines,” that they have “no feeling,” that they “do not see,
hear, or smell,” and that their “apparent states of consciousness,” as they seem
to us, are only the “results of a mechanical reflex process.”
Huxley follows Darwin, and therefore claims to be descended from a monkey,
62
He either believes what he says, or he does not. If he does, he is, on his own
shewing, a man-monkey, and as such can have “no feeling.” -
Let him offer himself then on the shrine of Science, to be experimented on
ad libitum. We shall very soon see and hear whether, as an animal, he has
feeling or not.
These doctrines, and such as these, have to answer for the cowardly barbarities
practised on helpless animals in the much-abused name of Science, “falsely
so-called.” - - -
Let him and such as he be told what good men and true think of these
abominable practices.
Here are a few examples out of any number of the opinions they have expressed.
A “Hell.”—(SIR ARTHUR HELPs.) sº
“Protracted cruelties.”—(SIR CHARLES BELL)
“Abominable and atrocious.”—(LORD SHAFTESBURY.)
“Hellish.”—(DR, KITCHING.)
“Detestable villainies, protracted butcheries, degrading the operator far
lower than the brute on which he exercised his fiendish skill, Soiling the hands in
blood, and grovelling in torture for hours, aye for days together.”
- (The late LORD CARNARVON.)
“Who have made a path over the bodies of writhing animals to seats of most
questionable honour.”—(J. F. B., in THE HOUR)
“A damnable process,” “Nothing can justify it,” “No discovery worth the
name has been logically due to it,” “I close my ears to their heartless Sophistries.”
(DR, HALL, in the MEDICAL GAZETTE.)
“Many of the facts alleged are so hideous, that it is better only to hint at
them,”. “The bare statement of the charges seems to stain the imagination.”
(CORNHILL MAGAZINE.)
“Atrocious crimes,” “Barbarities,” “Wickedness,” “Worse than the worst
Infernos,” “Dens of Torture,” “Disgrace to Science,” “Never surpassed in
impudence,” “Polluters of the minds of School Children,” “Ruffians,” “Young
reprobates,” “Perpetrators of atrocities,” “Spouters of Blasphemy and Infidelity,”
“Professors of Brutality,” “Worse than Heathen persecutors,” “Deceivers of the
people,” “Scientific crimes,” “An outrage to the moral sense of every human
being who is not as depraved as themselves,” “A few brutalized physiologists,”
“who go whining about the country with the importunity of beggars, because
every right-minded man and woman in the country is not compelled by law to
contribute his or her hard-earned wages to support the perpetration of crimes
which they abhor.”—(DR. W. B. A. SCOTT.)
“Disgraceful butchery,” “Devilish,” “Loathsome,” “Fiendish,” “Would
disgrace the lowest type of Savages,” “Merciless and unpitying,” “Demons,”
“Devilry,” “Wretches,” “A depraved instinct,” “Frightfully horrible,”
“Disgraceful butchery,” “Devilish torment,” “Horrible,” “Abominable devilry,”
“Brutal beyond conception,” “Useless beyond belief,” “All most horrible,”
“A disgrace to the profession,” “Brutal deeds.”—(A London Surgeon, MR.
WALDRON BRADLEY, in the Echo).
63
“Execrable cruelties.”—(REv. F. O. MoRRIS.)
“Human brutality taking advantage of the helplessness of dumb animals.”
“Cowardly cruelty.”—(COUNTESS DE GASPASIN.)
“Their practice as various as their theories,” “much in the aspect of
school-boys, playing with weapons of which they understand neither the use nor
the nature.”—(ROYAL COMMISSIONERS.)
“A set of young devils.”—(DR. H.AUGHTON.)
“A new horror.”—(PROFESSOR F. W. NEWMAN.)
“This most odious and useless form of cruelty,” “Frightful cruelty,”
“Horrors and cruelties—make the blood run cold,” “Horrible operations,”
“Horrible experiments.”—(R. T. REID, Esq., Q.C., M.P.)
“The insolent cruelty of modern Science,” “A horrible outlook,” “A glaring
hypocrisy about the whole thing,” “Horrible cruelty,”—G. RUSSELL, Esq., M.P.)
“Harrowing operations,” “Most revolting cruelties,” “The devil of
cruelty,” “Wholesale and reckless cruelties,” “Barbarities of Science,”
“Cowardice and selfishness.”—(Echo.)
“Cruelty in its worst form is the ultimate result of science,” “Cruelty
in the garb and pretences of Science,” “Now, Science has become the rival
of the tortures of the darkest ages and by increase of learning has learned
to torment still more ingeniously.” “Ancient Paganism may well put it to
shame,” “To cut up a living horse, day after day, in order to practise students
in dissection, is a crime and abomination hardly less monstrous from his not
having an immortal soul.” “An inevitable logic would in a couple of
generations unteach all tenderness towards human suffering—if such horrors are
endured—and carry us back into greater heartlessness than that of the worst
barbarians.” “A new oppression.” “The scientific Torquemadas of the day,”
“The inseparable companion of the vilest impurities and vices to which flesh
is heir.”— (Saturday Revien'.)
.”
Surely the cries and the looks of the poor animals will haunt the
beds and the dying beds of those who have thus, for a time, hardened
their hearts against every feeling of mercy and compassion, as some of
them have had before now to own to in terrible remorse.
This is a sample of the way these pseudo-philosophers go to work.
tºº"
Now for Lubbock and his lucubrations. The following letter from me
appeared in the Morning Post newspaper on the date referred to:—
THE BRITISHI ASSOCIATION.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING POST,
Sir-One would have thought that the “force of folly could no further
go" than it should have been gravely propounded to us by a President of the
British Association, at the Annual Meeting four or five years since, that a bit of
64
moss adhering unsinged to a red-hot thunderbolt, shattered off from some
wrecked world in the illimitable regions of space, had fallen upon this earth,
millions upon millions of years ago, bringing within it the “promise and
potency” of every single species of animated nature, animal and vegetable, of
body, Soul, and spirit, -
But just now we have had it as gravely told us at York, by the President,
Sir John Lubbock, that he and his friends—none but they—can “see at a
glance " that the tiger is striped with reference to the jungle it lives in. He has
not told us what conceivable connexion there can be between the two, nor why,
if it be an advantage, Natural Selection has not given the like striping to all the
other animals that live in the jungle.
Next, “we”—that is, he and his friends, and they only—can “see at a glance ’’
that the lion is “Sandy like the desert.” I suppose our grandfathers and grand-
mothers and every old woman knew that when they were children ; but here,
again, the President has left us in the dark as to what on earth the statement is
to tell us beyond what we were already so well-acquainted with.
Moreover, as a matter of fact, the lion does not live in the sandy desert, but
in the dense jungle, amidst an infinity of colours of the brightest and darkest
hues; and when he comes out, “roaring after his prey" into the open desert of
sand—if it be sand, for it may just as often be of clay or any other earth—it is
at night, when the colour of neither can have any effect whatever, one way or
another. Let him go to the old Bible, and he may learn the A B C of this
matter. “Thou makest darkness that it may be night, wherein all the beasts of
the forest do move. The lions, roaring after their prey, do seek their meat from
God, The Sun ariseth, and they get them away together, and lay them down in
their dens.” Nay, even in this case, if the similarity of colour could be supposed,
as I can only conclude the President intended us to imagine, to be of use to the
royal beast in stealing on his way unobserved, his roar would have given them
ample notice of his approach long beforehand.
Again, thirdly, we are told that the “markings of the leopard resemble the
spots of Sunshine gleaming through the leaves”!
Well, if they did—though they do not—there positively is not the most
distant resemblance between the two so that one could be mistaken for the
other. What use would it be to the leopard even if there were such resemblance?
Sir John; Lubbock did not enlighten us on this point.
Why, the leopard, too, sleeps in his lair while the Sun is shining, and prowls
about in the dusk of night to seek its prey, its own roar, in its Way, making
itself heard by every animal within hearing of it.
And these idle dreams are told us with the utmost gravity by the President
of the British Association, on its fiftieth anniversary at York, in proof of the
superior insight of the Darwinian clique, and as establishing for ever as Wonderful
discoveries, the scientific value of the flimsy fancies and vain vagaries of that
“Craze.”
Huxley, too, put in an appearance careering on the stage on his old hobby.
His worn-out abortive “little horse” (Hipparion) had been long enough since
65.
on its last legs, but the wretched creature has now been fairly ridden to death.
It is to be hoped that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will
take the case up. - . . . . . . . . . . .
I am, Sir, your very obedient servant, -
*... • º - * * F. O, MORRIS,
Nunburnholme Rectory, Hayton, York,
September 6, 1881. - i
And now, lastly, for Huxley and his hallucinations. Only the other day
he evolved out of his inner consciousness a new nondescript, from which I know
not what amount of strange notions were to be broached, -
But what came of it? Nil 1 Nothing but this, that at the last meeting at
Sheffield, the “Professor” had to come before the public, in British Association
assembled, and own, with the best face he could put upon it, that it was all a
myth, the mere creation of his own brain; and so the wonderful creature had
to be relegated to the depths of the “vasty deep,” out of which it had been
evolutioned as the “promise and potency” of the Wildest doctrine of
Darwinism.
What next 7 -
“The Andalusian merchant that returns
“Laden with cochineal and China dishes,
“Reports how strangely Fogo burns,
“Amidst an ocean full of flying fishes.
“These things seem strange, but much more strange am I,
“Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.”
Percy's Reliques.
Stranger still is the submarine “Bathybius,” (Anglice, “High life below
seas,”) summoned up from the “dark unfathomed caves” of the ocean's bed, to
be made into humble pie for the food of a “Philosopher.”
Yes, a Philosopher who had the assurance, not to use a much stronger word,
to tell the world in the Times newspaper that his great boast is, that he always
writes simply and plainly, but who was brought to book for such ampullas et
sesquipedalia verba as those I have quoted above. Yes, the philosopher who, at
a bye-meeting of the British Association at Belfast, the same, I believe, as that
at which he delivered himself of the sapient remark I have quoted above,
adopting it as his own, though it had been hatched abroad, spoke with the modesty.
which is so becoming in a man who calls himself a Professor of Science, and
especially so at the annual meeting of the Society, of all who did not agree with
him as “pigmies in intellect.”
Finally, for a few others, for whom even a postScript is too good a place.
A Mr. J. G. Romanes propounded at the meeting of the British Association at
Dublin, some most out-of-the-way fancies about instinct, which were thoroughly
well handled in a leading article in the Daily Express. It told him that “seldom
has a person so poorly equipped with the necessary preparation come forward to
E
66
enlighten the world upon a subject so vast and so complicated ;” with an abun-
dance more of disparaging comments, most richly deserved.
Again, at a meeting of the Anthropological Institute, a paper was read from .
a Mr. D. Macallister, another of these would-be wise men, on the Aborigines of
Australia, and I give it as a specimen of the way the new theories are hatched
After various remarks about the people, he concluded that he / had “no.
doubt '' (which does not prove much), that “if” the continent of Australia had
remained undiscovered a few thousand years longer, changes of climate and
intercourse with other savages “ºvould have "created an “environment "l more
favourable to progress than any which has ever existed, and improved the
people !
As it was, the absence of wild beasts, and the abundance of their food,
“may have been "a potent cause of their “non-progressive character ſ”
What is all this but the merest and most idle speculation ? It appears,
however, to have been acceptable to the Society with the high-sounding title
before whom it was delivered, and it is to be hoped they may derive much
benefit from such a lucubration.
I had a letter not long since from an Oxford first-class man and fellow of
Oriel, in which he told me of a new theory as to heat, propounded by another of
these wise men. He wrote to me—“It appears, according to the philosophers,
that the heat of the Sun is due to the action of gravitation in condensing and
contracting the original nebula ; and supposing the nebula to have extended as:
far as the orbit of Neptune, the contraction would give heat enough to last for
twenty million years.
“But this is wholly inadequate to the demands of the biologists, so the
wise man” (one Croll) “conceives, by the “Use of the Imagination in Science,”
the happy idea of making his nebula hot to start with !
“But where does he get his heat ' If I understand the account of his theory,
he “prolongs his vision back ’” (Tyndall's valuable invention) “to a time long
before the existence of the nebula, and imagines that all the matter in the solar
system was aggregated in two enormous masses on the opposite sides of space,
and that then ‘somehow ’” (Darwin's satisfactory expression and explication of
his notion) “they came into collision, and were thereby dissipated into nebulous.
matter l’”
The author of the extraordinary fancy of the origin of the colour-sense—
for nothing but fancy is it or can it be-his name is Allen—takes it into his
head that the first animal could only just distinguish light and darkness. How
it first came by the “nerve sensitive to light,” Which Darwin invents for his.
help, neither he nor Darwin has told us. All the latter does is to borrow a
receipt of Mrs. Glasse's well-known “Cookery Book,” and he hunts up a “thick.
layer of transparent tissue” to begin with. Whence it came, or what brought.
67.
it to where Darwin wanted it to be, and how came all the after-processes on to
the 24,000 lenses in a single eye, he has not found it convenient to Say. Then,
in some few billions of years, more or less, there came the capacity to perceive
Colour, and this handed down from marine creatures to fishes, and then to .
reptiles, and from them to birds, and then to animals | This colour-sense, he
fancies, would strengthen, and the possessors of it all the more, by degrees, take.
pleasure in the exercise of it, and gratify themselves by a choice of bright foods .
and gaily-coloured partners |
In due time it came to man, and hence, no doubt, one must Suppose,
the paintings in the National Gallery and in the Royal Academy.
“ Unde datum sentit,” this dreamer does not tell us.
A Mr. Lowne, too, has distinguished himself by Some wild speculations as to
the nests of birds, to wit, that they only came by degrees to learn how to build
them. 4.
Another, no less than a President of the British Association, has accounted
for the existence of life on the earth by the supposition gravely propounded to
us, as before stated, that a bit of moss adhering unsinged and unscathed to a
red-hot thunderbolt shattered off from some wrecked world in the illimitable
and unknown realms of space, fell to the earth millions upon millions of years
ago, and became the “promise and potency,” in the words of another of them, of
every single species of the whole of the vegetable and animal kingdoms—of body,
Soul, and spirit.
And this nonsense, not from some obscure “man of Science,” Some mere
“professor,” some conceited “man of science,” but, as I have said, from a
President of the British Association, at one of its annual meetings, and repeated
either by him or some one else, I forget which, at the following anniversary.
One word on Hereditism as a “development”, “evolved” from its grandmother
Darwinism.
* EIEREDITISM.'
SIR,--I was in hope that we had come to the end of the “isms’ of which this
latter part of the nineteenth century has been so prolific, but the defunct
‘Hereditism” has been revived, as would appear from an article in your columns.
It is really too absurd. Every one who has a pair of eyes can see the lie given to
this precious “theory” every day of his life. Where is the family in which
strength, handsomeness, or talent, is perpetuated unfailingly, generation after
generation ? where the one in which the complexion, the colour of the eyes, or of
the hair, is thus handed down 2 Was Bidder's father equally gifted with himself,
or Shakespeare's father, or Scott's, and so on, ad infinitum ? The cloven foot is
68.
shown in the article by dragging in the word “Evolution of which no doubt the
‘ism 'forms part and parcel. I hope medical men will be above taking the paltry
bribe offered to them to give any countenance by way of answers to the
preposterous questions propounded to them, insults to the private histories of their
own families . In future, according to your correspondent, before a woman makes
up her mind to accept an offer of marriage from a man, she must make inquiries
with regard to her intended or intending husband on all, or more, or fewer of the
following points, some hundreds in all, taking in the “different ages,’ ‘decease,”
‘persons,’ &c. : a queer way of having the ‘banns asked.' -
‘1. Race: Comprising the race of the grandparents; e.g., whether Highland
or Lowland, Scotch, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Huguenot, or other refugee, or Jewish;
and if any grandparent is descended from ancestry long resident in the same place,
the place is to be mentioned. 2. Conditions of life: Town or country; school;
occupation or profession at various periods; if married, age and date of marriage
of the person and his wife, or her husband, and number of children. 3. Form and
feature; height and weight at different ages; colour of hair and eyes; complexion;
brief description of general appearance; malformations. 4. Health ; date of
birth; diseases and accidents; Outline of medical life; history of deceased mem-
bers of the family, and the causes of their deaths; ages at deaths. 5. Vigour;
amount of work performed both bodily and mentally; measurements of muscular
force and quickness of limb. 6. Sensation; keenness or imperfections of sight and
other senses; dexterity. 7. Artistic capacities. 8, Intellect measured, (a) rela-
tively, as by competitive successes or failures in youth ; (b) absolutely, by the
quality of the work done. 9. Character, as indicated by non-professional pursuits,
by authenticated anecdotes, by public tributes to public services. 10. Unclassed.
Surely the writer must have presumed largely on the forbearance of readers
of his farrago, winding up as he does with a sentence which to my mind is but
little removed from the blasphemous.
In future, too, he will be an unwise son that knows his own father,
for he will have all these voluminous particulars to go into if he does; ‘and
happy man be his dole,' if he has “had no grandfather.” The whole absurdity
carries its own confutation and contradiction on the face of it; for if there were
anything in the notion, what need to ask what the characteristics of a son's
father were, when from the son's inheriting them they will “go without asking?'
Wunburnholme Rectory, Hayton, York. F. O. MoRRIs.
-- (IN “CHURCH BELLs”).

t
ALL THE ARTICLES OF THE DARWIN FAITH,
THE REW, . F. O. MoRRIs, B.A.,
PRICE Two AND SIxPENCE,
*º-gº
LONDON : S. W. PARTRIDGE AND Co., PATERNOSTER Row.
&ºmºmº
These remarks form a rather long pre-
face to the consideration of the very small
gº before us—a pamphlet the visible
ulk of which does not give a fair idea even
Of the actual amount of matter which is
Contained in its pages, the print being of the
§mallest. A much more considerable work
in point of appearance might have been
made out of half the amount of material.
Mr. Morris has acted on the principle ex-
preSSed in the Well-known line of Horace
about the pre-eminent power of ridicule in
Cutting things to the quick. His little
brochure looks like a mere squib, and if
it Were no more, it would be at least an
amusing one. But it is a great deal more
than a squib. He professes to give the
“Articles of the Darwin Faith ” in a series
of Short propositions, ridiculous enough as
they lie before us in his pages, and yet
Which we believe it would be difficult for
the most devoted disciple of Mr. Darwin
to repudiate as unfair. We do not, of
Course, vouch for every single proposition
aS having been extracted verbatim, and
Without violence to the context from the
Writings of the authors quoted—for Pro-
fessors Huxley and Tyndall furnish Mr.
Morris With his materials as Well as Mr.
Darwin, But we believe, in all sincerity,
that the propositions quoted, and which
are absurd enough to be understood as such,
even by persons who have not studied the
books from which they are taken, are really
Or equivalently to be found in the Writings
Of these authors. We believe that Mr.
Morris has not been unfair, either in the
general idea, which he gives of our modern
Sophists, or in the particular opinions which
he attributes to them, or in the expressions
of self-assertion and self-confidence which
lie puts into their mouth, if he does not
rather take them from it. It is precisely
because the pamphlet is not a simple skit,
that we are sorry to see it in a form so
Comparatively insignificant. It is the Work
of a man who is quite at home with his
authors—a man who is devoted to physical
science himself, and who has contributed
his quota to our natural history in a manner
Which shows that he is Well acquainted
With the cost and value of the careful investi-
gation of facts and the comparison of evi-
dence. It is, therefore, the jeu-d'éSprit of
One Who has as much claim to the title of
philosopher as either of the men on Whose
Works he comments so severely and yet. So amu-
Singly. He has not given chapter and verse
for his quotations—they would have been
Out of place in so small a work—but if these
Were added, as We have little doubt Could
be done, the pannphlet before us would be
valuable, even to those who may have to
Confute in the class-room the errors which
have been supported by the authority of
the Writers named. A Christian Plato would
find materials here ready to his hand for
many a Socratic dialogue on the false dog-
matism of the day, THE MONTH (ROmân
Catholic),
|
The question as to whether man was
Created “a little lower than the angels,” or
Whether by a process of evolution, he has
COme to be SOmething better than a tad-
pole, is one of undeniable interest, and it
appears that modern philosophy—so called –
finds a good deal may be said in favour
of the tadpole theory, although old-fashioned
folks not much given to change, and slow
to adopt new doctrines, may be brusque
enough to declare that “in the mutitude "
of such words “there wanteth not folly” or
Sin. Still Messrs. Darwin and Huxley are
“deep thinkers,” and it is surely well to
know something of the conclusions to which
they have attained, as the result of their
profound meditations. This valuable infor-
mation is abundantly Supplied in the clever
pamphlet now before us. Its writer, the
Rev. F. O. Morris, who is honourably known
as the Editor of the “Humanity Series of
School Books,” published by the Society
for promoting Christian Knowledge, and
who is the author of an admirable “History
of British Birds,” has taken great pains to
bring together at least an approximately
complete statement of the Articles of the
Darwinian belief. We only wish that Mr.
Morris had, in order to facilitate our com-
prehension of the Darwinian philosophy,
been so thoughtful as to number these
“Articles,” not of Faith, but of credulity,
for their sum far exceeds that of the feet
Of the Wonderful little insect from which
we imagine it must be Mr. Darwin's “boast. "
that his “birth is deduced.” Need We name
the centipede?
JFrom Such an embarras de richesses it
is hard to cull extracts more choice than
the rest ; but we will do our best, only
premising that our readers would do well
to invest a shilling in the purchase of the
pamphlet itself.
And now We think we have done enough
to prove that this able and amusing pam-
phlet will abundantly repay perusal. We
wish we could reproduce the grotesque title-
page, which exhibits the gradual evolution
of quadrupeds, tripeds, bipeds, and unipeds,
including monkeys, donkeys, and giraffes.
We must not, however, conclude Without
expressing our sincere thanks to Mr. Morris
for having waded so deep into the profound
thoughts of the philosophers whose views
he has undertaken to expound. We feel as
if he had, for our Sakes, penetrated into
some vast and bottomless mora,SS, whence
he has emerged to give his experience for
the benefit of incautious Wayfarers. Equally
baseless are the theories he has exposed;
and far more dangerous Would be their
adoption than a plunge into a veritable
quagmire, RECORD (Church of England),
2
An elegant and lively jeu d'esprit, Mr. Morris has in playful but most
convincing satire exposed the gross inconsistencies, the large assumptions, and
the unscientific deductions contained in some well-known works. This little
brochure deserves a wide circulation. It will, perhaps, accomplish mightier
victories than the heavier artillery of a ponderously learned treatise.-Notes
and Queries. -
Mr. Morris, as a well-known naturalist, has a right to speak on a subject so
intimately connected with his life-long studies; and in this pamphlet he certainly
puts some of the difficulties of Darwinism in a manner both forcible and
amusing.—Church. Bells.
A fair, though often ludicrous, exposition of the doctrines advanced by
Messrs. Darwin, Huxley, and others, who claim to be philosophers, but who are
by many considered and designated as philosophical atheists. The extracts from
the criticisms of the London press on the vagaries of Darwinism are not the
least amusing portions of this lively pamphlet.—Bookseller. 3.
The author of this amusing but exhaustive reply to the Darwinian philosophy
of man is well known in the world of natural history as an Ornithologist, and, if
we may be allowed the term, as an ornithophilist. Mr. Morris has very clearly
shown in this charming brochu're not merely the untenable character of the
Darwinian theories, but their inconsistency one with another.—Daily Eaſp?'é88.
A clever and lively little pamphlet. The theories of Darwin, Huxley,
Tyndall, and other scientists are here dealt with in a way so amusing as to be
ludicrous and entertaining in the extreme, Mr. Morris's reductio ad absurdum
being at once a smart and pungent process, Those who have read in The Times
this gentleman's occasional letters from his Yorkshire rectory, will know how
enthusiastic a naturalist he is—indeed, perhaps no man to-day enjoys a greater
eminence on this subject than he does. We are not surprised then to find his
exceptional knowledge creeping out here in a hundred different ways, to the
utter confusion, it seems to us, of the cardinal doctrines of the creed, if it may be
so called, of Darwin and his followers. In its own fifty short pages, we have
here a David stout enough to overthrow this latest Goliath of Infidelity, and
whoever takes the little book in hand must relish the completeness of the
demolishment no less than the wit and Sarcasm by which it is accomplished,—
Doncaster Chronicle,
In a clever and amusing pamphlet, the Rev. F. O. Morris, of Nunburnholme,
so celebrated for his Ornithological researches, exposes the many assumptions and
manifest unsoundness of much of modern philosophical statement. Not all is
science that comes from scientific men, and searchers after truth will do well
not to accept any assertion, however positive and dogmatic as proven, till after
close and careful examination of the Supposed grounds on which it rests. Mr.
Morris has done excellent service by showing that many “Scientific * men, who,
on certain matters, “strain at a grat,” are quite ready, nevertheless, when it
falls in with their own preconceived notions, to “swallow a camel.”—National
Church.
The Rector of Nunburnholme has long been most favourably known as a
writer on ornithological subjects, and as the author of “A History of British
Birds”—a work of the highest interest and value. The pamphlet before us,
however, shows that his gifts do not lie in one direction ; that to the powers of
the naturalist he unites the skill of the controversionalist. Mr. Morris is
exceptionally qualified to deal with this important subject, because his long and
acute study of natural history enables him fully to comprehend the technical
details of Mr. Darwin's theories. That he has made himself perfect master of
the subject a brief glance at his pages will suffice to show. The style of the
work is ingenious, and very effective, and well designed to impress the general
public. Mr. Darwin's various opinions are formulated as in a creed (the title of
the pamphlet would suggest as much), and their extravagance, their unscientific
character, and the extent to which they rest on mere assumptions, are thus made
8
evident. To clergymen and those interested in religious education we can
warmly commend this little work as an antidote to much of the poison of
sceptical literature, and it might very profitably be placed in the hands of
Sunday school teachers.-Worcester Journal. -
A clever, sarcastic pamphlet, quite worth reading by those who have
interested themselves in the evolution controversy. Particularly we recommend
it to those flippant scientists who seem to fancy that Darwin's opponents are by
this time finally settled, and who would place that theorist himself on the level
of such true discoverers as Newton and Copernicus, not to mention such a
crushed pigmy as poor Moses at all. The superciliously confident tone adopted
by the advocates of the “one-portal” idea of creation has imposed on a section of
the student world, and it has certainly justified the satire of this author, who
represents an imaginary Darwinite as arguing that opponents “distinguished in
the highest departments of art, science, and politics, are quite beneath me in
mind and attainments, for if I am right, as I must be, and therefore am, they, of
course, must be wrong.” Darwinism has what the Americans would call “a long
row to hoe” yet before it can get itself quoted on the exchange of discovered
truths.-The Chemist and Dºuggist.
This is a marvellously clever jeu d'esprit, blowing all the Darwinian nonsense
to the winds. Mr. Morris is not an amateur, or a dabbler in science, but an eminent
Scientific man, profoundly versed in natural history, and therefore quite com-
petent to do battle with the Scientific sceptics on their own ground; and right
nobly has he turned his knowledge to account in this little brochure. He uses the
weapon of ridicule with wondrous power, a power rendered forcible by the truth
upon which he takes his stand, and the scientific facts which he knows so well
how to handle. The pamphlet ought to be circulated by tens of thousands. We
fear it is not much known, we ourselves should probably not have heard of it,
had we not seen a copy on the railway bookstall at York. Our readers will, we
trust, make it widely known.—Shield of Faith.
Mr. Morris has been an ardent and energetic enquirer into the phaenomena
of nature, especially in one direction, as he is favourably known to the public as
the author of a “History of British Birds.” Through the nature of his enquiries,
therefore, and the earnest spirit with which he has pursued them, we can readily
imagine the fervour he would display in examining the theories of Mr. Darwin,
and the bold and startling assumptions which that gentleman indulgesin. When
Mr. Darwin is confronted with the extremely remote and uncertain nature of the
agencies on which he relies, he continually falls back on what “might have been "
in the lapse of unlimited periods of time. Such a style of argument is, to say
the least, destitute of any Scientific value, and we are glad to find that Mr.
Morris has, in the brochure now before us, searchingly exposed it. —The Christian
Globe.
Messrs. Tyndall, Huxley, and Darwin do not believe in the existence of a
personal Creator. With their private opinions we have nothing to do ; but we
must protest against their forcing their unbelief on others by the help of such
very illogical reasoning as that which is so happily and amusingly exposed in
this little brochure. If Christians attempted to defend their faith by entirely
ignoring the arguments of their opponents, and flying in the teeth of proba-
bilities, we rather fancy that an unorthodox counterpart of Mr. Morris might
have some legitimate grounds for derision,--National Church.
A capital piece of satirical writing, from the pen of the Rev. F. O. Morris,
who, on the principle of answering a fool, according to his folly, mercilessly
ridicules Mr. Darwin's theories by setting forth, with much gravity, “All the
Articles of the Darwinian Faith.”— Fireside Magazine,
The two great weaknesses of Mr. Darwin's book on his theory of
development are, first, that his arguments are as a rule based on
suppositions—that they are “continuous conjugations of the potential mood,”
and, secondly, that his illustrations, though apparently apt for the required
4.
particular case, will not admit of general application, and are contradicted by
other well-known natural phaenomena. Mr. Morris has seized upon these salient
points, and by similar suppositions and contrast of illustrations has compiled an
amusing “creed,” full of absurdities.—The Schoolmaster.
The Rev. F. O. Morris, of Nunburnholme, has recently entered the lists as
antagonist of Messrs. Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall. As an accurate student of
nature he can speak with authority; and we therefore entertain a hope that he
may be induced eventually to handle the specious doctrine of evolution more
exhaustively. The brochure he has just issued conduces to a very high estimate
of his powers, not only as a naturalist, but also as a close reasoner and profound
thinker. Mr. Morris has, in short, in a tone of severe sarcasm, paraded the
difficulties and inconsistencies of the new philosophy. He has converted the
most imaginative notions of its teachers into the form of a creed, which he in
detail tests by a severe and uncompromising logic. A more wholesome regimen
of the shallow minds of those juvenile sciolists, who vault over every physical
and metaphysical barrier to a foregone conclusion, could not well be conceived.
The lax logic of Mr. Darwin (as it reads when ruthlessly exposed by Mr. Morris)
is enough to tempt its critic to gibbet it for the ridicule of common sense. His
entire chain of reasoning appears in this small pamphlet in the light of what
logicians term petitto principii, an assumption of unproved proof; and it seems
on that account little short of astounding, that its atheistical conclusions should
have been so readily accepted by a large class of educated thinkers. If one of
Mr. Morris's exact information would reply in eactenso to theories concocted to
account for a disbelief in a Creator, and as a consequence in moral responsibility,
he would be effecting a real good for the community at large ; inasmuch as
ideas, which eliminate the pricks of conscience, and permit of moral obliquity,
spread like noxious weeds, but too fast. It is to such men as Mr. Morris, men of
both varied and deep learning, that the Christian world looks for a rational
defence of a rational faith. To judge from his terse, incisive pamphlet, Mr.
Morris is just the man to face them with all the ability of a Paley, and a far
more extensive acquaintance with the phaenomena which form the basis of
contention.—Doncaster Gazette,
Mr, Morris is a zealous and unsparing opponent of the Darwinian theory, His
accurate knowledge on all subjects connected with Ornithology and entomology
certainly entitles him to a respectful hearing on the subjects. The
ingenuity of Mr. Darwin's theories and his industry in collecting facts to
support them cannot fairly be denied, and if justice had been done to him in
these respects, the attack upon his weak points would have come with all the
greater force. The disposition to frame elaborate hypotheses on very slender
evidence is justly ridiculed; and we learn, not for the first time, that it is quite
possible for men of science to be as intolerant and prejudiced as the most dogma-
tic of theologians.—Ecclesiastical Gazette.
We must admit that in Mr. Morris's hands the philosopher has a bad time of
it, and many of his pet arguments vanish into thin air. If Mr. Darwin could
ever convince us of the addition of a single organ to any one species of living
being in earth, air, or water, we would then heartily go hand in hand with him,
and maintain that his position was tenable. But without a tangible proof of
this, we cannot see how his theories are to be sustained, and in this one point in
particular we think that Mr. Morris is unanswerable. In fact the position assumed
by Mr. Darwin is extremely illogical, and to those whose minds he has at all biassed
with his groundless inductions we heartily recommend a perusal of Mr. Morris's
pamphlet to dissolve the illusion from their eyes. The only fault we have to
find with it is its brevity, and we sincerely hope that it will not be his last effort
towards opening the eyes of the multitude to a farce that, once thought out,
would never more be entertained.—0aford University Herald.
The publication of this little work will, doubtless, operate as a corrective
to the insidious influence of the theories propagated by Darwin, Huxley, and
Tyndall, with respect to the origin of species. The pamphlet has a two-fold
5
value. In the first place, the bases—or rather the want of bases—upon which
Darwinism rests, are exposed with such skill and logical sequence, that the
impartial reader must needs rise from its perusal with the consciousness that the
author has not only succeeded in showing the utter absence of any sound
arguments in support of the “Darwin Faith,” but under his manipulation they
degenerate into undisguised absurdities. In the second place the closing pages
of the work lead over the whole ground of controversy, and the treatment which
the subject receives, in a small way, will be found to dissipate one by one those
extravagant motions which have given to Mr. Darwin's theory the only
importance it possesses, The work is one which should be placed in the hands of
all young students, and for its intellectual vigour it is worthy of the foremost
place in the author’s “Humanity Series.”—Bromsgrove Messenger,
This is dedicated to “The Right Honourable the Common Sense of the
People of England.” It is a very ingenious attempt to throw ridicule on
Darwinism. Mr. Morris is well aware that ridicule is one of the most potent of
controversial weapons, and it is likely he will inflict more harm on the Darwinian
teaching by this method of attacking it than if he had set himself the task
of writing an elaborate and voluminous treatise against it.—Land and Water.
It gives us great pleasure to be able to direct the attention of our readers to
two little works from the pen of the Rev. F. O. Morris, of Nunburnholme, so
well known for his interest in all that concerns the animal world. “All the
Articles of the Darwin Faith ” is a very successful attempt to throw ridicule
upon the theories of the preachers of evolution, and we perfectly sympathise with
Mr. Morris in his intentions; possibly Satire is one of the strongest antidotes to
these wild Creeds.
A lively little sketch, the author of which very cleverly shows the weak side
of the Darwinian theory.—Rook.
Mr. Morris is well-known by his voluminous and elaborate “History of
British Birds,” and also by his wholly scientific and half humourous opposition
to Darwinism. In this pamphlet he has grouped together certain statements of
that school, not in philosophic order of thought, but as the Articles of a Creed,
and on the whole very fairly, and so as to represent in the main their views, and
really few would credit, without examination, how much of the “I believe”
there is in these special works of Darwin. His motto for them is suggestive—
“Credo Quia Impossibile Est.” He has also collected six pages similar to the
following “Origin of Species” alone. And if this be not faith, we know not
what is :—“Almost inevitably ; I think ; I think; it seems pretty clear; I am
strongly inclined to suspect ; my impression is ; may ; I think; seems probable ;
almost compels us; perhaps ; I think ; may be ; makes me believe ; I believe ;
we may safely conclude ; not improbable ; I think; I think; I do not believe;
I believe ; I cannot doubt ; I do not think.” We cordially commend the
pamphlet to all, whether believers in Darwinism or not, as it is unique in
literature, and most suggestive.—Champion of the Faith.
This is a marvellously clever jeu d'esprit, blowing all the Darwinian non-
sense to the winds, Mr. Morris is not an amateur, or a dabbler in science, but an
eminent scientific man, profoundly versed in natural history, and therefore
Quite competent to do battle with the scientific sceptics on their own ground ;
and right nobly has he turned his knowledge to account in this little brochure.
He uses the weapon of ridicule with wondrous power, a power rendered forcible
by the truth upon which he takes his stand, and the scientific facts which he
knows so well how to handle. The pamphlet ought to be circulated by tens of
thousands. We fear it is not much known, we ourselves should probably not
have heard of it, had we not seen a copy on the railway bookstall at York, Our
readers will, we trust, make it widely known.—Shield of Faith.
Mr. Morris, so well known to the readers of the Times as an eminent
naturalist, has dealt a blow at Darwinism which ought to prove a lasting
B
6
àiscomfiture. His treatment of the subject is severe ; and he has evidently
felt that there are occasions when “a fool is to be answered according to his
folly.” “The complicated guess-work” upon which Darwinism builds its
monstrous theory, is exhibited in the most amusing, as well as the most forcible
manner. The self-sufficiency of this modern school of would-be philosophers,
and their assumed depth of thought under the guise of high sounding scientific
phraseology which no one can well understand, find a telling exposure. As the
best possible antidote, in a very cheap form, for the mystifying and dangerous
teaching of the “Darwin Faith,” we recommend the circulation by thousands of
Mr. Morris' admirable and comprehensive tract or treatise. He dedicates it to
“The Right Honourable the Common Sense of the People of England,” and the
Common Sense of the people will know how to appreciate it. A vast deal
of matter is compressed within about fifty pages.—Our Own Fireside.
This subject has been so often and so ably treated of in the Quarterly
Beview for 1861, p. 225, and elsewhere, that we do not propose to enter at length
into a further disquisition. Suffice it to say, that Mr. Darwin, having brought
his astonishingly extensive knowledge of natural science and his great powers of
composition to bear on a favourite theory, long ago held up to ridicule by Frere
and Canning in the “Loves of the Triangles,” (vide Anti-Jacobin Poetry,
p. 110,) in nothing shews the weakness of his cause so much as the first facts
that having accumulated a wondrous mass of material, when he comes to the
proof he is forced to load his deductions with assumptions, and yet with these
helps (?) has been proved entirely to have failed. Nay more, he has, by the very
facts he is obliged to bring forward, as the lawyers say, shown himself out of
court—in other words, proved that the different species which he assumes
proceeded from one or a few originals, are now, always have been, and no doubt
always will be kept entirely distinct—the only cases in which intermingling
is perpetuated being those where, in effect, the species are not distinct, but have
a common formation. The author of the pages we are now to speak of has
employed a weapon which has often more power than elaborate reasoning—even
irony, for it deserves a higher name than ridicule ; and adopting Mr. Darwin's
propositions, stripped of their fascinating foliage, has held them up to that light
which they certainly will not bear. Besides this treatment, Mr. Morris has
subjected the work to the strictures found in the Times, and to the consideration
of the theories of his supporters, no less persons than Professors Tyndall and
Huxley ; and lastly the few terse lines with which Mr. Punch dispatched the
labour of years:
“Darwin's speculation
ſs of another Sort,
'Tis one which demonstration
In no wise doth support.
Time, theories' dispeller,
Will out of mind remove it ;
We say, as said Old Weller,
‘Prove it'—and he can't prove it !”
The Quarterly Review is not attainable by all, especially a Review of fourteen
years old; but here we have an able refutation in little more than a pamphlet
size. We earnestly recommend its perusal by our readers. Moreover it is fit
that a minister of the Gospel should stand forward to oppose such a doctrine as
that put forward in these theories.—Weston Mercury.
This is a very good pamphlet for reference in the study of the deeply
interesting question involved. Those of our readers who have a knowledge of
the subject will find the whole of the articles amusingly abstracted, in thirty-four
Small pages; while the remaining sixteen, give a kind of commentary. If an
over zeal for sharp, direct reasonings and incontrovertible theory be displayed,
there is the foil presented of wit and knowledge of the subject, Mr. Morris is
author of “A History of British Birds.”—Scientific and Literary Review.
The appearance of this third and greatly enlarged edition of Mr. Morris's
Well-known attack on Darwinism, happens to coincide with the death of the
7
distinguished author of that system. Perhaps it is not to be regretted that
these pungent and unanswerable pages should issue afresh from the press at
a time when the public is liable to be carried away by the universal laudation
of the great naturalist. No one can justly deny to the late Mr. Darwin the
praise due to high character, patient research, great powers of observation,
and skill in marshalling his numerous facts. What we object to is not his facts,
but his fancies. The facts he states are most interesting, but the fancies he
attaches to them are most dangerous. The world is too easily dazzled by a great
name. Because Mr. Darwin has written interesting books full of original
observations, it is not necessary that we should adopt his wild theories and
illogical conclusions. In Mr. Morris's racy book we have “All the Articles
of the Darwin Faith,” arranged in a manner which surprises and amuses the
reader. He has taken Horace's hint with regard to the power of ridicule in
cutting things to the quick. The doctrine of Evolution, which Mr. Darwin has
Suggested and laboured to prove, is shown to be as baseless as a morning dream.
The weak points of the theory are remorselessly exposed—the want of logic held
up to “inextinguishable laughter.” We hope that the timely republication of
Mr. Morris's book, in enlarged form and improved appearance, will make many
pause before they allow “All the Articles of the Darwin Faith.” to supersede
the Articles of the Church's faith, or suffer themselves to imagine that these
airy theories have in the slightest degree shaken the Solid foundation of
historical Christianity—“ the facts of ages and the hopes of men.”—Irish
Ecclesiastical Gazette.
This is undoubtedly a clever book, and the writer makes many points with
great. Success.-Church Bells.
*...* “I have received your valuable exposure of Darwinism, and most
heartily thank you for it. I believe that your mode of treating the preposterous
fictions of Darwin is the only way to shake the self-confident tone of would-be
philosophers. Newton's grandest saying, after ‘Deus non est AEternitas Sed
AEternus,' was “Hypotheses non fingo.” Newton kept back his ‘Principia' for
years, because a mistake had been made in an arc of the meridian, So closely did
he keep to experimental truth. Now, the crude fancy, nothing like so ingenious
as the Ptolemaic cycles, because really the Darwin fancy stumbles at every step,
is exalted to a rank exceeding that of the discovery of gravitation. In a clever
sermon by Pritchard, new Savilian Professor at Oxford, and formerly President
of the Royal Astronomical Society, preached before the British ASSociation when
Grove presided, he exposes the folly of this stuff, and in his appendix to a print
of it proves that the chances against the eye being formed by development are
more in number than Darwin's work being taken by the printer to pieces and
tumbled into a bag, and then thrown back on the table in the same Order that
they came.”—(Lord) HATHERLEY, Lord Chancellor of England, in a letter to
the Rev. F. O. Morris,
30, Portland Place, London, W., June 4th, 1877.
Your opinion of “Darwinism” is (evidently) the same as my own, and
I do not doubt that I shall read it with much interest, though I have not
yet found time to do so.
(LORD) SELBORNE (Lord Chancellor of England.)
Everingham Park, York, April 28th, 1877.
Your pamphlet supplies a want which I have felt for some time,
the necessity of meeting these pseudo-Scientific men on their own ground
and showing from a popular point of view their inconsistencies and rash
aSSumptions.
(LORD) HERRIES.
s sº e . Woodville, Douglas, Isle of Man, November 9th, 1877,
Most interesting and amusing,
(BISHOP) R. SODOR AND MAN,
s
tº e g g I)wblin Castle, August 26th, 1875.
Your “Darwinism” is admirable. Lady Burke and I read it through last
º the utmost satisfaction. You have, indeed, reduced the heresy ad
(l,0SQUI”(l/M/10.
(SIR) J. BERNARD BURKE, Ulster.
Lordship Lame, Tottenham, mear London, March 28th, 1877.
—With which I am greatly pleased and think that it presents very clearly
the absurdities of the dream of Darwin's which has succeeded in deluding so
many. I am glad that you have so severely rebuked the presumption and folly
of this most fallacious of all reasoners who specially deceive by a show of
candour in which there is no reality. He relies, and may safely rely, on the
credulity of his followers, who with all their professions of free thinking, are
generally of the class of mind which seems formed to follow implicitly the
dogmatic teaching of Some successful leader. Their aim is to hoot down all
opposition.
JOHN ELIOT HOWARD.
39, St. Giles, Oacford, Jume 4th, 1877.
There can, however, be no doubt that your critical analysis of “All the
Articles of the Darwin Faith ” is very able and very complete. It cannot fail,
I think, to be read by many persons with very great interest.
(REV.) RICHARD GRESWELL, B.D.,
(Double First Classman, Fellow and Tutor of Worcester College, Oaford).
Worcester College, Oacford, June 11th, 1877.
You have strongly exposed the absence of logic in his unscientific and
absurd reasoning. You have also shewn that, Huxley and Tyndall are
chargeable with similar want of faithful reasoning.
(THE REv. DOCTOR) RICHARD LYNCH COTTON
(Fellon, and Tutor and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford.)
Selham Rectory, Petworth, April 17th, 1877.
You treat well the vulgar self-sufficiency which speaks of everyone who does
not bow down to it as a fool. Literary charlatans have, in the natural order of
things, possibly by a sort of evolution, gullible readers provided for them.
(REV.) ROBERT BLACKBuRN, First Classman, formerly Scholar of Baliol,
Fellow of Brasenose, Ireland Scholar, Oaford.
Teignmouth, October 5th, 1877.
Your amusing satire on the Darwinian Creed, which I hope has had a good
effect upon some readers.
(REV. D.R.) G. A. JACOB
(First Classman, Worcester College, Oaford).
Royal Naval School, New Cross, June 19th, 1875.
I need not say that I agree heart and soul with you, and that it seems to me
simply impossible for Darwin and his train to answer your pithy arguments.
Some of these are put in a way that must make them wince, if they can be
reached by delicate irony. -
(REV.) E. B. SLATER, M.A., Head Master.
Tempsford Rectory, Sandy, May 5th, 1877.
I have read your tract with the utmost delight. It is really admirable.
(REv.) W. G. CookESLEY, Late Master at Eton.
25, Harley Street, Cavemålish Square, London, W.
You have certainly succeeded in showing up the weak points in Mr.
Darwin's case, and, to boot, given him a most sarcastic whipping.
(DR.) GEORGE HARLEY, F.R.S.
Torimo, Italia, Feb. 1st, 1883.
Your book has so much pungent carbonic acid gas in it that it cannot fail to
trouble the brain of the strongest Darwinite. Your exposure of Darwinian
presumption is so excellent that I scarcely ever enjoyed a book so much,
(CAV.) GULIELMO JERVIS.
9
Penn Hill, Weston, Bath, September 27th, 1875.
Thank you very much for your note, and for sending me a copy of your
exceedingly clever, and at the same time amusing analysis and dissection of the
Darwinian theory, and I can't conceive how any one who thus sees its frag-
mentary facts, its illogical reasoning, its absurd demands upon one's credulity,
and its ill designed attempt to degrade the God of Nature into the mere agent
of vice ;-I say, I can scarcely conceive any one, who thus sees all this in its true
light, continuing Serenely to uphold such more than vain and silly speculations,
and I sincerely hope that your little book may, by its wide circulation, give
increased impetus to the tide, which, as Canon Kingsley said, was already
Setting in against Darwinism.
C. W. GRANT (Colonel, Royal Engineers).
e º Rectory, Cheltenham, January 31st, 1883.
I have been reading your article on Darwinism with great pleasure.
(REV. CANON) CHARLES D. BELL.
Toyal Italian Industrial Museum, Turin, Italy, November Ist, 1887.
Your admirable and witty publication in confirmation of the antiquity of
the pedigree of a celebrated naturalist “differentiated into a man(iac).”
GULIELMO JERVIS.
Demarth, Truro, February 14th, 1883,
I read with much enjoyment “All the Articles of the Darwin Faith,” and
also “The Gospel according to Darwin,” in the Rock—“cutting sarcasm.”
NICHOLAS WHITLEY.
31, Harley Street, London, June 30th, 1881.
I read with much pleasure all the Darwinian Articles of Faith. You have
gagged Darwin most unmercifully, and he richly deserves it.
J. M. WINN (M.D.)
Education Department, Whitehall, London, March 13th, 1879.
I read with much pleasure the pamphlet you were So kind as to send me,
and greatly appreciated the excellent points you made against the Darwinians.
W. COURTHOPE.
Sandhurst, Torquay, September 4th, 1877,
“How forcible are right words.” These words of the Patriarch came to my
lips as I read your admirable pamphlet “The Articles of the Darwin Faith.” Be
assured that the cogency of your criticism has quite commended itself to my
judgment, as the spirit of your faithful testimony for God, particularly the
. . . . . . . . has to my Warmest sympathies.
P. H. GossE, F.R.S.
84, Somerleyton Road, Bria:tom, London, S.W.
I am sorry to hear that your pamphlet on Darwinism is out of print, and
trust you will see your way to the issue of another edition, as it is calculated, I
think, to do a great amount of good.
GEORGE SEXTON M.A., LL.D., ETC.)
JBowrmenowth, May 3rd, 1881.
C'est non seulement l'oeuvre d'un homme d'esprit, mais aussi et surtout
l'oeuvre d'un Chretien qui de place les aberrations de l'esprit humain alors qu'il
prend sa raison pour guide et foule aux pieds la Verité Eternelle.
FANNY JUSTE.
Croft Rectory, Warrington, September 1st, 1876,
I enjoy greatly your hearty earnestness,
(REV.) THOMAS P. KIRKMAN.
Rheine W. Prussia, September 12th, 18%,
I find your work, “The Articles of the Darwin Faith,” mentioned in a very
approving manner. Might I therefore beg you to authorise me to translate your
work, and to publish a German edition of it !
- OTTO LöLING.
39, St. Giles, Oacford, July 12th, 1875.
Undoubtedly clever, and in every respect very interesting.
(REV.) RICHARD GRESWELL, B.D.,
Double First Classman, Fellow and Tutor of Worcester College, Oaford,
10
Centraliste, des grossen Dewtschen Reichsbunder gum, Schwise der. Thiêne,
Bremen, dem 13th December, 1878.
It affords me very great amusement to read your brilliant objections as
regards Darwinism. |
J. F. C. KüHTMAN.
& g º Gilling, Richmond, Yorkshire.
We have your Articles of the Darwin Faith which we read with much
pleasure,
HENRY DARLEY.
. . Stoke Prior. Vicarage, Bromsgrove, February 21st, 1876.
Your exposé of Darwin's principle is both good and amusing.
* (REV.) HARCOURT ALDHAM.
in e Buckshead, Hayle, Cornwall, Jan. 87th, 1876,
I must endorse the critique I refer to in the “Western Daily Mercury.”
B. WIVIAN.
144, Kingsland, London, August 4th, 1885.
C. R. W. OFFEN.
St. Twke's, Sheffield.
I take great delight in commending the Shilling book, “All the articles of
the Darwin Faith.” I am one of the Lecturers of the Christian Evidence
Society, so that I have had some opportunities to commend the book, which
ought to sell a thousand per day, as it will do far more good than all the
ponderous works of the learned men.
The Darwin Faith is excellent,
(THE REv. DoCTOR) S. G. HILLIER.
º 16, Church Road, Tunbridge Wells, February 17th, 1885.
I have read with much pleasure and profit your publications on the
“Articles of the Darwin Faith.”
(HoN.) P. CARTERET HILL.
g St. Mark's, Sheffield, March, 3rd, 1887.
Your interesting and trenchant “Articles,” most destructive of Darwin's
theories, and amusing to his opponents.
(REv. CANON) S, WALSHAW.
30, Bardolph Road, Tufnell Park, London, N., October 21st, 1887.
I have heard so much praise of it. -
J. Bi "EY.
Stanton Court, Stanton-on-Arrow, Herefordshire, St. Patrick's Day, 1877.
Very trenchant and amusing. -
(MRs.) C. CROFT.
Tempsford Rectory, Samdy, March 2nd, 1877.
I have read them with sincere pleasure, and I hope profit.
(REV.) W. G. CookESLEY, M.A., Late Master at Eton,
. St. Martin's Vicarage, Stamford, November 19th, 1875.
Your Satire upon Huxley, Darwin and Co. is capital.
(REV.) A. R. WEBSTER.
! . Tiptree Hall, ESSéa, November 19th, 1875,
I was much amused with your Darwinism.
I. I. MECHI.
Newhall Vicarage, Burton-on-Trent, February 9th, 1876.
Your excellent pamphlet,
(REV.) MARLBOROUGH CROSSE.
Cheviot House, Berwick-on-Tweed, December 87th, 1883.
F I have just read, with great delight, your “All the Articles of the Darwin
ait .” t
- F. M. NORMAN, Captain, R. W.
- - & Cheviot House, Berwick-On-Tweed, December 29th, 1883,
Your pamphlet is delicious.
- - F. M. NoFMAN, Captain, R.N.
Cheviot House, Berwick-on-Tweed, January 29th, 1884,
Your excellent “All the Articles.” * |
- (CAPTAIN) F. M. NoFMAN, R.N.
11
Piccadilly, April 2nd, 1883.
The very amusing Tract of the Rev. F. O. Morris, “All the Articles of the
Darwin Faith.” He certainly hits Darwinism very hard. Mr. Morris has done
much good work as a Naturalist. Really clever. º
94, Vyse Street, Birmingham, November 27th, 1883.
I just managed to glance through them, and am quite satisfied that they are
a complete exposure of the Darwin fables. .
H. ALLEN.
Chapel House, Weston Turville, Tring, Buckinghamshire.
As to your clever pamphlet, I can only say that it must meet with the
approval of all Christian men, and will, doubtless, do good. It needs no
recommendation, it commends itself to all intelligent readers.
(REV.) F. WALKER (Congregational Minister.)
Bristol, September 1st, 1875.
I think Mr. Morris's exposition of the “Darwin.” Principle very clever, and
have obtained a score copies. -
(MRs.) HELEN A. ToRR,
St. Luke's, Sheffield, November 13th, 1876,
(REv. DR.) S. G. POTTER, D.D.
St. Luke's, Sheffield, Oct, 20th, I876,
(REv. DR) S. G. Potter, D.D.
-- l}ath, January 24th, 1877.
I purchased it some time since, and I value your work greatly.
(REV. PREBENDARY) J. WooD,
The Warren, Wottom-under-Edge, Gloucestershire,
It is indeed a “redoubled edition,” and I hope may be doubly effective.
(MISS) GERTRUDE AUSTIN.
York, November 9th, I875.
W. PROCTER (M.D.)
Furmell House, Fremsham, Farmham, Surrey, June 18th, 1877.
I read it with great interest and pleasure. The more I learn, the more
difficult I find it to believe in any such hap hazard ways of carrying on
the life of the world.
TUFFEN WEST (M.L.L.)
East Acklam Rectory, York, June 26th, 1877.
It is admirable.
What I really consider very able.
Your able pamphlet.
It is very amusing. -
(REv.) T, BRIERLY BROWNE.
Poyal Institution of Truro, August 18th, 1877,
I am reading with much pleasure and profit your “ All the Articles of the
Darwin Faith.” You have done good service in putting the infidel breed (for it
is nothing else) in contrast with the Christian Faith.
NICHOLAS WHITLEY.
Chapel House, Weston Turville, Tring, Bucks,
Your valuable work on the Darwin absurdity.
(REy.) F, WALKER (Congregational Minister.)
The Avenue, Bedford, April 7th, 1877.
I am very pleased with it, and I think a careful perusal of it would
Somewhat try the faith of “ Darwinites.”
C. M. PRIOR,
Woodside, Douglas, Isle of Man, June 13th, 1877.
I have read the pamphlet with interest, and you certainly administer heavy
punishment. On many points the conclusions to which Darwin's theory points
are painful and repulsive in the extreme,
EDWIN BIRCHALL.
The Warren, Wottom-under-Edge, May 24th, 1877.
I sent a copy the other day of your Darwin “redoubled ” edition to a friend,
and he is delighted with it. (MISS) GERTRUDE AUSTEN,
/ 12
~ * - e Berkeley Square, London, December 14th, 1877.
I have carefully read it and enjoyed it. y
* * (REV.) W. G. COGHLAN.
g º t Warter Vicarage, March 16th, 1878.
“All the Articles of the Darwin Faith” is highly entertaining, and its mode
of dealing with the “Faith ” is no doubt the best that could have been thought
9f, as the system is in the extreme ridiculous, the most telling argument against
it must be ridicule. -
(REV.) R. D, FRENCH,
The Cottage, Gilston, mear Harlow, October 19th, 1878.
I have never told you how much your “Articles of the Darwin Faith.” has
been appreciated. I have lent my copy to so many, who have, on reading it,
º it to be so good that they must get one for themselves. It is so very
Clever.
(MRS.) MARTHA REEVE.
- 26, Harley St., Cavendish Square, London, W., April 15th, 1883.
Your clever attack on Darwinism,
(DOCTOR) GEORGE HARLEY, F.R.S.
g tº Q 8, Oldham, Street, Manchester, January 18th, 1883.
It is a most interesting volume on Evolution, and I should very much like
to have a copy.
J. J. GLEAVE.
36, Shakespeare Road, Northampton, January 28th, 1883.
Your valuable little work, “All the Articles of the Darwin Faith.” I
have read and re-read it with considerable interest and profit—so powerful and
effective a refutation of the followers of Darwinism.
THOMAS BARKER.
tº e 25, Harley Street, Cavendish Square, London, W.
The frontispiece to which gave me an appetite for its perusal, and which,
Strange to Say, has not been satiated by its indulgence.
(DOCTOR) GEORGE HARLEY, F.R.S.
Teign mowth, October 10th, 1877.
It is very good.
(REv. DR.) ANDREW JACOB,
(First Classman, Worcester College, Oaſord.)
Yorkshire Penny Bank, 2, IEast Parade, Leeds, October 26th, 1877.
I have read your book with much pleasure, both to myself and to my
family. Your way of treating the Darwinian delusion is the only one it
deserves, -
PETER BENT.
Hampsthwaite Vicarage, Ripley, Yorks, September 12th, 1877.
It is as complete a reductio ad absurdum as ever I read. Cicero said some-
where that “there is nothing so absurd as not to have been maintained by Some
of the philosophers,” this witness as true, and never more So than in the present
day.
(REv.) HENRY DECK.
te Lordship Lane, Tottenham, London, September 25th, 1877.
Your piquant volume,
JOHN ELIOT HOWARD.
Ross, Herefordshire, November 30th, 1881.
Its perusal has afforded me much entertainment. w
* W. C. BLAKE,
I lik Darwin’” ºutnum Rectory, Sleaford, June 13th, 1882,
I like your “Darwin’” very much.
(REV.) A. MYERS.
- 49, Crutched Friars, London, July 24th, 1883,
I think you have triumphantly tripped up the Darwinian theories.
r NEWTON CROSLAND,
13
t Allerthorpe Vicarage, June 23rd, 1881.
I was not only amused, but much interested in your treatise. I think it
most useful, and especially at this time. If you publish a new edition, we will
endeavour to get subscribers.
(REv. DR) J. J. IRWIN
Charing Cross Hotel, Londom, November 18th, 1886.
Your indignant and admirable protest against Darwin.
t F. R. WARING.
Army and Navy Club, Pall Mall, London. S.W., November 18th, 1880.
— expressing the great pleasure I had derived from its perusal. I may say
there is a heartiness and vigour about it which is really refreshing.
F. R., WARING.
tº & Bournemouth, April 28th, 1881.
Madame Juste is much pleased with your Darwin pamphlet,
St. John's Vicarage, Lynn, February 28th, 1879,
I had your Darwinian work, and was much amused with it.
(REv.) JoHN BRAMHILL.
Great Casterton Bectory, Rutland, June 25th, 1879.
Your pleasant and pungent sarcasm on Darwin's speculative “philosophy.”
falsely so called, consisting as it does almost entirely on assumption and
conjecture.
(REv.) AARON AUGUSTUS MORGAN.
& & Tottenham, London, August 27th, 1875.
Your “Articles of the Darwin Faith,” which I have read with amusement
and appreciation.
JOHN ELIOT HOWARD.
St. Cuthbert's Rectory, Heworth, York, November 16th, 1877,
Your valuable works, especially on Evolution.
(REv.) A. R. FAUSSETT,
25, Harley Street, Cavendish Square, London, W., September 8th, 1877.
I have read your brochure from beginning to end with interest.
GEORGE HARLEY (M.D. F.R.S.)
28, Gloucester Street, London, N.W., February 21st, 1876.
Your excellent pamphlet. t
ALFRED J. H. CRESPI.
Termell House, Frensham, Farmham, Surrey, June 18th, 1887.
I read it with great interest and pleasure. The more I learn, the more
difficult I find it to believe in any such haphazard ways of carrying on the life
of the world.
TUFFEN WEST (M. L. S.)
Fast Acklam Rectory, York, June 26th, 1887.
It is very amusing.
(REv.) T. BRIERLEY BROWNE.
+ Wia 8 Secondo, T. Torimo il 22 Jennais, 1883.
Last month my sister sent me from Naples a copy of your splendid book,
“Articles of the Darwin Faith.” Will you sneer at a hearty sincere congratula-
tion from the foot of the Alps? One alteration let me suggest in the title page.
Instead of Common Sense of the People of England read of all Civilised Europe.
Alas! dear Sir, your book is full of wit indeed. It is a magnificent series of
logical conclusions, but you are the very first to have pointed out that the
Darwinites never attended the class of logic at School, I fear, therefore, that
they will scarcely understand your wit as I should wish. Still, I see no better
way of curing authors from upsetting Biblical Revelation. So Scandalously than
by turning their own absurdities into ridicule.
GULIELMo JERVIs,
(Conservator of the Royal Italian Industrial Museum, Turin, Member of the
Italian Geological Society at Rome ; of the Geological Society of London ;
Correspondent of the Imperial and Royal Geological Institute at Vienna, &c.)
14
D IF FIC U LTIES OF DARW IN ISM.
LONDON: LONGMANs & Co.
PRICE Two SHILLINGs.
This pamphlet, by the Rev. F. O. Morris, rector of Nunburnholme,
Yorkshire, author of “British Birds,” &c., and whose name is familiar to most of
our readers as the unwearied friend and protector of the animal world, consists
of two addresses read before the British Association, at Norwich and Exeter,
with a preface and correspondence with Professor Huxley. The theories pro-
pounded by Mr. Darwin in his works on “Natural Selection ” and “Variation of
Species,” are taken up by Mr. Morris, who presents a series of questions to Mr.
Darwin and his followers which, after careful consideration, have been pronounced
by scientific men as perfectly unanswerable. There is also an amusing passage
of arms between Professor Huxley, one of the leading champions of Darwinism,
and Mr. Morris, in a correspondence contained in the pamphlet, in which the
Professor does not appear to advantage. Without presuming to give a positive
opinion on the subject in dispute, we heartily recommend Mr. Morris's pamphlet
to our readers, in the belief that it will repay perusal, and will be found to
contain much that is interesting, argumentative, clear, and convincing.—
JBromsgrove Messenger.
This pamphlet, by the Rev. F. O. Morris, Rector of Nunburnholme,
Yorkshire, author of “ British Birds,” &c., and whose name is familiar to all
readers of The Times as the unwearied friend and protector of the animal world,
consists of two addresses read before the British Association, at Norwich and
Exeter, with a preface and correspondence with Professor Huxley, Mr. Darwin,
in his works on “Natural Selection” and “Variation of Species,” brings together
a mass of interesting facts, and then proceeds to build upon them a series of
extravagant theories, the tendency of which is to unsettle our belief in the great
Creator and Preserver, to remove Almighty God out of the world which He has
made, or at least to relieve Him from the continuous oversight of the work of
His own hands. The facts which Mr. Darwin adduces as a careful observer of
nature are, of course, deserving of all attention, but the airy fancies which he
rears upon this solid foundation are as dangerous as they are illogical. We have,
therefore, reason to be thankful when Such men as Professor Agassiz, in America,
and the Rev. F. O. Morris, and Dr. M'Cann, and others, in England, come
forward, as in the work before us, to combat the philosophers on their own
ground, and overthrow them with their own weapons. There is an amusing
passage of arms between Professor Huxley, one of the leading champions of
Darwinism, and Mr. Morris in a correspondence contained in the pamphlet before
us, in which the professor does not appear to advantage. Further, a perusal of
“Anti-Darwinism,” as likely to do good to those who make Mr. Darwin's incon-
clusive book their Bible. We may also recommend to him Mr. Morris's own
“Difficulties of Darwinism.” So long as such objections remain without a
categorical reply, the public may be pardoned in Supposing that truth is on the
side of the reverent enquirers who keep to the safe “old paths,” and not of the
self-confident theorists who boldly “rush in where angels fear to tread.”—
Liverpool Albion.
This pamphlet, by the Rev. F. O. Morris, Rector of Nunburnholme,
Yorkshire, author of “British Birds,” &c., and whose name is familiar to all
readers of The Times as the unwearied friend and protector of the animal world,
consists of two addresses read before the British Association, at Norwich and
Exeter, with a preface and correspondence with Professor Huxley. The facts
which Mr. Darwin adduces, as a careful observer of nature, are, of course,
deserving of all attention ; but the airy fancies which he rears upon this solid
foundation are as dangerous as they are illogical. The bridge which connects
his facts and his theories is thoroughly untrustWorthy. And yet, because Mr.
Darwin has collected a number of interesting illustrations of natural history
which are indisputable, there is reason to fear lest the unsound deductions which
he draws from them should be confounded with his ascertained facts, and
|
15
accepted by the public without examination, on the authority of a great name:
and thus the dreams of a philosopher be permitted to disturb the faith of the
unlearned. We may be allowed to give an extract or two from “The Difficulties
of Darwinism "in illustration of Mr. Morris's style, merely premising that as he
is himself an authority on entomology and ornithology, his remarks on those
Subjects have a peculiar force and value.—Dublin. Evening Mail.
Mr. Morris has now moulded the materials of the two papers, together with
those of a third, which he succeeded in reading at Norwich, into a well-digested
pamphlet, which forms a convincing answer to Mr. Darwin's two books on
“Natural Selection” and “Variation of Species.” The former work Mr. Morris
brands as the most illogical book that he should have thought could be written
until he read the second, which he at once condemned as exceeding its prede-
cessor in “absolute unmitigated inclusiveness.” To the pamphlet is appended
a Somewhat singular correspondence, carried on in the spirit common to great
philosophers in all ages. Professor Huxley had told the Association at Exeter,
in his off-hand style, that all Mr Morris's objections to Mr. Darwin's theories
had been already answered. Mr. Morris thereupon wrote to the professor, telling
him he should be much obliged if he would tell him where he could find the
answers. Professor Huxley, after a fortnight's interval, despatched a curt reply
to his correspondent, telling him that he would find the answers he wanted in
five or six years' serious study of physical and biological science, and a return at
the end of that time to the “Origin of Species,” which he was to read as he
would his Bible. Mr. Morris was not to be outdone in this style of composition,
and promptly rejoined upon his correspondent with a recommendation that he
should enter at some small hall at Oxford, and devote himself to a six years'
Course of study there, and intimated that at the end of this “profitable "
preparatory discipline the Professor might possibly find himself qualified to com-
prehend the elementary processes of logic. Mr. Morris observes that the
Professor did not find it convenient to answer this last missive, and he confesses
that he did not think that he would. We hope, however, that the professor will
not fail to read his antagonist's pamphlet, and, if he would undertake a real
answer to it, the result would be as curious as the correspondence with which
Mr. Morris has enlivened his publication.—Yorkshire Post.
Read before the British Association at Norwich and Exeter, in 1868 and
1869; with a preface and a correspondence with Professor Huxley, by the Rev.
F. O, Morris, B.A.—The Christian.
This work is further enhanced by the valuable correspondence given,
between the author and Professor Huxley, touching the most crucial tests of the
Darwinian system. In these pages Mr. Morris proves himself more than a
match for the Professor, as well as for Mr. Darwin, and faces every difficulty
presented to him with the courage of a man who feels he has taken up a position
on the impregnable ground of fact and reason. Here is an interesting specimen
of Mr. Morris's force of reasoning against the natural principles of Darwin,_Rock.
A very interesting and able little work, published lately by One of our most
distinguished naturalists, Mr. Morris, on the “Difficulties of Darwinism,”
contains a correspondence with Professor Huxley, which is certainly not the
best onen for the peace and prosperity of the next meeting of the British
Association. Into the scientific merits of this remarkable publication we cannot
here enter. Often as the monstrous character of this theory has been com-
mented on, we have never seen it dealt with so curtly and convincingly before,
as by Mr. Morris. Professor Huxley, in a letter which we shall forbear to quote,
gets into an unphilosophic tone of mind. It is a great merit of Such biographies
as those of Faraday and Brewster, that they show that Science need not to be
brought into conflict with religion, and that if this happens it is not altogether
so impossible that religion should have the best of it, and that men of the
highest intellect may be both Christians and philosophers, bringing the spirit of
religion into the pursuit of Science, and the methods and Spirit of Science into
the investigation and practice of religious truth, London Society.
“Difficulties of Darwinism,” by the Rev. F. O. Morris, who evidently knows
what he is about, writes popularly, and hits hard.—Record.
16
Mr. Morris is well-known as the author of numerous works on Natural
History, which enjoy no common popularity. He is a writer who observes for
himself and thinks for himself, and his works are really his own works. These
“Difficulties” of his were read before the British Association at Norwich and
Exeter in 1868 and 1869; and they now are published in pamphlet form with a
preface, and a correspondence with Professor Huxley, in which the Professor
does not get the best of the encounter. We recommend waverers, with certain
Darwinian proclivities, to read these few pages by Mr. Morris, as we also
commend them to those who either are confirmed Darwinites or are proof
against Darwinism. In every case these “Difficulties” are worthy of study, and
they cannot fail to be studied with good effect, We shall have more to say about
them hereafter.—Worcester Journal.
We have, therefore, reason to be thankful when such men as Professor
Agassiz, in America, and the Rev. F. O. Morris, and Dr. M'Cann, and others, in
England, come forward, as in the work before us, to combat the philosophers on
their own ground, and overthrow them with their own weapons. In his
“Difficulties of Darwinism,” Mr. Morris presents a series of questions to Mr.
Darwin and his followers which, after careful consideration, have been pro-
nounced by Scientific men as perfectly unanswerable, Space forbids our giving
extracts, but we heartily recommend the pamphlet to our readers. It is an able
and masterly refutation of the follies of “philosophy falsely so called.”—0ur
Own Fireside.
I have now finished a very attentive perusal of your pamphlet, “Difficulties
of Darwinism.” To my mind, and I should think to any unsophisticated mind,
your refutation of Darwinism is, and cannot but be felt to be perfect, complete,
unanswerable. I have read the pamphlet with intense satisfaction, with this
Only regret that a production so able should be put out in pamphlet form, and
not as a “book,” Such as might be bound up with Darwin's books, (bane and
antidote under the same sheep-skin,) or at least stand side by side on the same
bookshelf. I should like to see your pamphlet honestly reviewed by Huxley, or,
failing him, by one of his disciples. But this one can scarcely hope to see
done,—Professor g
I have read your “Difficulties of Darwinism" with much pleasure. I was
as much Surprised as you are that Darwin's fables for children should be
accepted by grown men. The present shallowness of intellectual speculators—
Tarwin, Huxley, Mill, and Baine—depends on the loss of religious belief. We
shall never have manly thought among us again until we have re-instated
religious belief. This was the sole object of the misunderstood Hegel, whom
your extract from the Saturday Review—after the mode Boeotian—classes
with Spinoza. , Esq., M.R. C. S., J. L.D.
I have read your “Difficulties of Darwinism” with great pleasure. You
have done the cause of truth and religion an important service. I am out of
all patience with such men as Darwin and Huxley, who turn good abilities to so
worthless and wicked an account. , M.A., Fellon of King's College,
Cambridge, and (late) Master of Eton.
A not merely strong but unassailable pamphlet.-Rev.
of St. John's College, Cambridge, Head Master of .
, M.A., Fellow
OPINIONS OF MEN OF LIGHT AND LEADING ON THE
DARWIN CRAZE.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
This is a pamphlet compiled by our respected contributor, the Rev. F. O.
Morris, consisting of the opinions of many eminent men on Darwinism. It will
be found very useful for distribution amongst those persons who are likely
17
to be misled by the two or three great names on the Darwin side of the
controversy. The price is but one penny, so it is placed within the reach
of all.—Shield of Faith.
It is a valuable collection of opinions expressed by men of science and
literature adverse to the views of Darwin. It has become too much the fashion
to treat Darwin's theories as if they were facts, and to suppose that the con-
troversy is ended. . As Professor Max Muller has said in the Contemporary
Jºeview.—“Dogma often rages where we least expect it. Among scientific men
the theory of evolution is at present becoming, or has become, a dogma. What
is the result 7 No objections are listened to, no objections recognised, and a man
like Virchow, who has the moral courage to say that the descent of man from
any ape whatsoeveris, as yet, before the tribunal of scientific Zoology, ‘not proven,'
is howled down.” Professor Virchow, of. Berlin, is one of the greatestiliving
scientific authorities on the continent. It is, perhaps, a fact not widely known
that Darwin was refused membership in the French Academy of Sciences on the
ground of the unscientific character of his books. We commend this penny
pamphlet to the attention of our readers, both for its merits and its suitability
for gratuitous distribution in the defence, of truth against theory.—Yorkshire
Gazette.
THE DARWIN CRAZE.
The Rev. F. O. Morris has republished, as a pamphlet, a telling paper of his in
the Leisure Hour on the “Plumage of Birds and Butterflies,” in vigorous antago-
mism to the views of Darwin and his school. To this he has added a preface,
in which he has collected out of Darwin's book “On the Origin of Species' no
less than four pages of conjectural expressions, “I think,” “We may safely
conclude,” “Not improbable,” &c. These he rightly designates as “tesselated
pavement of mere guesswork, fit for nothing but to be trodden underfoot.” The
pamphlet is highly amusing, as well as powerful in its arguments.-Record.
He carries the war into the enemy's country, destroying his opponents'
strongholds without mercy. The essay itself is a masterly production, un-
answerable from a scientific standpoint, and yet written in such a style that
the non-scientific reader will have no difficulty in clearly understanding it. The
writer is doing good service to Christian Truth by the issue of such admirable
publications, at a price which places them within the reach of all.—Shield of
Faith.
A clever pamphlet, in which Mr. Darwin's theory of development appears to
be non-plussed,—Church Bells.
An able and thoroughly successful attempt to show that of all the insults
to the understanding the world has ever seen, Darwinism is out and out the most
gross, and that the “Force of Folly can no further go.”—Daily Eagress.
Affords a rare specimen of powerful argumentation. Mr. Morris has proved
more than his capacity for tearing to shreds some of the vain imaginations which,
with the disciples of the materialistic school, pass for axioms.-Doncaster
Gazette.
It is a reply to Darwin's theories, trenchant and racy.—School Guardian.
We have learned with regret that the little work entitled, “All the Articles
of the Darwin Faith,” noticed by us in the last number of the “Shield of Faith,”
is out of print. Sincerely do we trust that the author will see his way to the
issue of a new edition. The pamphlet now before us comes from the same pen,
18
and deals with the same question. Mr. Morris is an opponent of Darwinism as
thorough as he is able. For many years has his name been before the public as
one of the foremost Ornithologists of the age ; his voluminous Work on “A
History of the British Birds,” published at six guineas, and his “Natural History
of the Nests and Eggs of British Birds,” published at three guineas, being
standard books amongst scientific men, His knowledge of the birds, butterfles,
and moths of Great Britain is admitted on all hands to be certainly equal to that
of any living man. To this question of Darwinism he comes, therefore, full
equipped and prepared for battle. He carries the war into the enemy's country,
destroying his opponent's strongholds without mercy.—Shield of Faith.
º J. H. University, Baltimore U. S., July 19th, 1880,
Whether it can be answered I cannot tell, but I certainly do not see how it
can be.
(PROFESSOR) C. D. MoRRIS, M.A.
(First Classman, Fellon of Oriel College, Oaford.)
& . Ashley Grove, Bow, Wiltshire, August 10th, 1880.
I am charmed with the “Darwin Craze.”
(MRs.) S. E. Joy.
43, Vivian Road, Roman Road, Old Ford, London,
Your work on the Darwin Craze, to my mind, is unanswerable.
C. A. ELFLEIN.
The Avenue, Bedford, August 20th, 1880.
C. M. PRIOR,
Fort Hall, Burlington Quay, August 18th, 1880,
I sincerely agree with every word of it.
F. A. BEDWELL (County Court Judge.)
I am very pleased with the Pamphlet,
Traºro, October 26th, 1880.
I have read your “Darwin Craze” with much pleasure and profit, and
was impressed with your remarks on the colours of Birds, Butterflies, and the
home-thrust from the colour of eggs arising from their admiration for each
Other. - -
NICHOLAS WHITLEY,
o Army and Navy Club, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
— Which I have read with very great pleasure.
F. R. WARING,
DOUBLE DILEMMA IN DARWINISM.
*
Read before the British Association at Glasgow, 1876.
tº-
PRICE THREEPENCE,
“Je viens de recevoir de mon excellent ami, (Sir) Bernard Burke, votre
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publier Sur un Sujet analogue. Il est réellement haut temps de faire justice,
19
mon pas des témérités, mais des stupidités, qui se débitent ainsi Sous le couvercle
d’une fausse science.”—Le DR. CONSTANTIN JAMES (Ancien collaborateur de
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“I think your anti-Darwinism arguments quite unanswerable” “Exceeding
good and clever.” “I have read them with great enjoyment,” — — — ?
I have read them with great enjoyment, * ,
C, MATTHEW PRIOR.
14, Bath Street, Southport, April 5th, 1887.
I thought them all splendid, especially the “Double Dilemma.”
J. R. CLAPHAM.
Victoria, Institute, 7, Adelphi Terrace, London, March 30th, 1887,
Your valuable paper.
(CAPTAIN) J. PETRIE.
Londesborough Rectory, Market Weighton, December 19th, 1876,
I think your two anti-Darwinian arguments quite unanswerable.
(REv.) RICHARD WILTON.
Chapel House, Weston Tenville, Bucks, April 12th, 1877,
Exceedingly good and clever.
(REv.) T. WALKER (Congregational Minister).
The unreasonableness of the Darwinian system has been demonstrated by
scientific arguments; great guns have sent many a heavy shot through its crazy
sides. Mr. Morris attacks it with light artillery, and opens a very Smart fire of
sarcastic sentences, in which the premises and conclusions, assumptions and
defects of the system are sharply contrasted, so as to show the unscientific
character of the whole. Those who are hit by Mr. Morris may protest against
the use of ridicule. They have provoked it by their presumption. It may teach
some of them to be more reasonable in their reasonings.-Record.
The acknowledged reputation which the author of the well-known “History
of British Birds” has, as a naturalist, renders him eminently qualified to deal
with the Darwinian theory. In the pamphlet under consideration the system
of Natural Selection, advocated by Professors Darwin, Tyndall, and Huxley, is
subjected to trenchant criticism, Invective, sarcasm, and a rich fund of quaint
humour, give a dash to the attack which will probably render it the more
enjoyable to the reader unacquainted with the scientific bearings of the
controversy, although it should be added that the adroit manner in which the
critic has employed the very phrases and sentences of those whom he opposes
as the implements of his castigation undoubtedly gives a reasonable view of
the other side of the question.—The Arron).
20
MINOR WORKS BY THE REW. F. 0. MORRIS, B.A.,
AUTHOR OF
“A History of British Birds,” in six volumes, royal octavo, £66s. (Dedicated
by permission to Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen.)
“A History of British Moths,” in four volumes, royal octavo, £6. (Dedicated
by permision to the Right Hon. Lady Muncaster.)
“A History of the Nests and Eggs of British Birds,” three volumes, royal
octavo, £33s. (Dedicated by permission to His Eccellency the Right Hon. the
Earl of Carlisle, K.G., Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.)
“A History of British Butterflies,” one volume, royal octavo, £1 1s. (Dedicated
by permission to the Hon. Mrs. Musgrave.
“Anecdotes in Natural History,” 5s. Dedioated by permission to the Most
Noble the Marquis of Westminster, K.G.)
“IRecords of Animal Sagacity,” 5s. (Dedicated by permission to the Hon.
Anne Emma Cavendish.)
“The County Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain, and
Ireland,” in six volumes, royal quarto, £9 9s. (Dedicated by permission
to Mrs. Thomson.)
“A Bible Natural History,” 10s. 6d. (Illustrated.) (Dedicated by permission
to His Grace the Lord Archbishop of York, Doctor Musgrave.)
“The Gamekeeper's Museum ;” a Series of Letters to the “Times” Newspaper,
with additions, 1s. (Dedicated by permission to John Walter, Esq., M.P.)
“A Catechism of the Catechism,” 6d. (Dedicated by permission to His Grace
the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Longley.)
“A Book of Natural History,” 10s. 6d. (Illustrated.)
“Dogs, and their Doings,” 7s. 6d. (Illustrated.)
“Anecdotes in Natural History,” 5s. (Illustrated.)
THE PARADISE OF THE SOUL |
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PRICE ONE SHILLING,
It is a Handbook of Devotion for daily reading, and especially for the Holy
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earnest, and real in tone—and the meditations and instructions likely to be
found very helpful.—CHURCH BELLS.
LETTERS TO “THE TIMES” ABOUT BIRDS, &c.
PRICE FIVE SHILLINGS, Bound IN CLOTH.
The Rev. F. O. Morris; has republished, in one volume his Letters to “The
Times " about Birds, dºc., and we are sure that in this more permanent
form they will find many delighted readers. If, as the Archbishop of York
has said, “Nunburnholme is the Selborne of the North,” it may be hoped
that these Letters will have somewhat the same effect in stimulating Natural
History studies as White's celebrated. History has had, RECORD. -
21
Mr. Morris is a worthy successor of Gilbert White. Although he is modest
enough to say that his love of birds and insects greatly exceeds his knowledge
of them, it is evident that he is a born naturalist, and that within a limited
range his observations may be thoroughly relied on. His “Letters,” it need
scarcely be said, should be read by everyone who has a taste for ornithology.—
PALL MALL GAZETTE.
THE SPARROW SHOOTER,
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“Ye slay them all ! and wherefore ? For the gain
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An able and thoroughly successful attempt to show that of all the insults
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MY UNCLE TOBY, in Tristram Shandy.
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