HOSE WHO HAVE BEEN AT THE PAINS to read the foregoing book will, perhaps, pardon me if I put before them a short account of the reception it has met with: I will not waste time by arguing with my critics at any length; it will be enough if I place some of their remarks upon my book under the same cover as the book itself, with here and there a word or two of comment.

The only reviews which have come under my notice appeared in the Academy and the Examiner, both of 17th May 1879; the Edinburgh Daily Review, 23rd May 1879; City Press, 21st May 1879; Field, 26th May 1879; Saturday Review, 31st May 1879; Daily Chronicle, 31st May 1879; Graphic and Nature, both 12th June 1879; Pall Mall Gazette, 18th June 1879; Literary World, 20th June 1879; Scotsman, 24th June 1879; British Journal of Homoeopathy and Mind, both 1st July 1879; Journal of Science, 18th July 1879; Westminster Review, July 1879; Athenaeum, 26th July 1879; Daily News, 29th July 1879; Manchester City News, 16th August 1879; Nonconformist, 26th November 1879; Popular Science Review, 1st January 1880; Morning Post, 12th January 1880.

Some of the most hostile passages in the reviews above referred to are as follows:

"From beginning to end, our eccentric author treats us to a dazzling flood of epigram, invective, and what appears to be argument; and finally leaves us without a single clear idea as to what he has been driving at."

"Mr. Butler comes forward, as it were, to proclaim. himself a professional satirist, and a mystifier who will

do his best to leave you utterly in the dark with regard to his system of juggling. Is he a teleological theologian making fun of evolution? Is he an evolutionist making fun of teleology? Is he a man of letters making fun of science? Or is he a master of pure irony making fun of all three, and of his audience as well? For our part we decline to commit ourselves, and prefer to observe, as Mr. Butler observes of Von Hartmann, that if his meaning is anything like what he says it is, we can only say that it has not been given us to form any definite conception whatever as to what that meaning may be."- Academy, 17th May 1879, Signed Grant

Allen.

Here is another criticism of Evolution, Old and Newalso, I believe I am warranted in saying, by Mr. Grant Allen. These two criticisms appeared on the same day; how many more Mr. Allen may have written later on I do not know.

We find the writer who in the Academy declares that he has been left without "a single clear idea" as to what Evolution, Old and New has been driving at saying on the same day in the Examiner that Evolution, Old and New "has a more evident purpose than any of its predecessors." If so, I am afraid the predecessors must have puzzled Mr. Allen very unpleasantly. What the purpose of Evolution, Old and New is, he proceeds to explain:

As to his [Mr. Butler's] main argument, it comes briefly to this: natural selection does not originate favourable varieties, it only passively permits them to exist; therefore it is the unknown cause which produced the variations, not the natural selection which spared them, that ought to count as the mainspring of evolu

tion. That unknown cause Mr. Butler boldly declares to be the will of the organism itself. An intelligent ascidian wanted a pair of eyes, so set to work and made itself a pair, exactly as a man makes a microscope; a talented fish conceived the idea of walking on dry land, so it developed legs, turned its swim bladder into a pair of lungs, and became an amphibian; an aesthetic guinea-fowl admired bright colours, so it bought a paint-box, studied Mr. Whistler's ornamental designs, and, painting itself a gilded and ocellated tail, was thenceforth a peacock. But how about plants? Mr. Butler does not shirk even this difficulty. The theory must be maintained at all hazards.... This is the sort of mystical nonsense from which we had hoped Mr. Darwin had for ever saved us."- Examiner, 17th May 1879.

In this last article, Mr. Allen has said that I am a man of genius, "with the unmistakable signet-mark upon my forehead." I have been subjected to a good deal of obloquy and misrepresentation at one time or another, but this passage by Mr. Allen is the only one I have seen that has made me seriously uneasy about the prospects of my literary reputation.

I see Mr. Allen has been lately writing an article in the Fortnightly Review on the decay of criticism. Looking over it somewhat hurriedly, my eye was arrested by the following:

"Nowadays any man can write, because there are papers enough to give employment to everybody. No reflection, no deliberation, no care; all is haste, fatal

1 See p. 38, and the whole of chapter 5, where I say of this supposition, that "nothing could be conceived more foreign to experience and common sense."

facility, stock phrases, commonplace ideas, and a ready pen that can turn itself to any task with equal ease, because supremely ignorant of all alike.”

*

"The writer takes to his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious ignorance, that strikes the keynote of our existing criticism. Men write without taking the trouble to read or think." 1

The Saturday Review attacked Evolution, Old and New, I may almost say savagely. It wrote: "When Mr. Butler's Life and Habit came before us, we doubted whether his ambiguously expressed speculations belonged to the regions of playful but possibly scientific imagination, or of unscientific fancies; and we gave him the benefit of the doubt. In fact, we strained a point or two to find a reasonable meaning for him. He has now settled the question against himself. Not professing to have any particular competence in biology, natural history, or the scientific study of evidence in any shape whatever, and, indeed, rather glorying in his freedom from any such superfluities, he undertakes to assure the overwhelming majority of men of science, and the educated public who have followed their lead, that,

1 Fortnightly Review, 1st March 1882, pp. 344, 345.

Я

while they have done well to be converted to the doctrine of the evolution and transmutation of species, they have been converted on entirely wrong grounds.'

"When a writer who has not given as many weeks to the subject as Mr. Darwin has given years [as a matter of fact, it is now twenty years since I began to publish on the subject of Evolution] is not content to air his own crude, though clever, fallacies, but presumes to criticize Mr. Darwin with the superciliousness of a young schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves or perhaps desires. One would think that Mr. Butler was the travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the pert speculator, who takes all his facts at secondhand."

"Let us once more consider how matters stood a year or two before the Origin of Species first appeared. The continuous evolution of animated Nature had in its favour the difficulty of drawing fixed lines between species and even larger divisions, all the indications of comparative anatomy and embryology, and a good deal of general scientific presumption. Several well-known writers, and some eminent enough to command respect, had expressed their belief in it. One or two far-seeing thinkers, among whom the place of honour must be assigned to Mr. Herbert Spencer, had done more. They had used their philosophic insight, which, to science, is the eye of faith, to descry the promised land almost within reach; they knew and announced how rich and spacious the heritage would be, if once the entry could be made good. But on that 'if' everything hung.