Brougham's attack on the undulatory theory of light when it was first propounded by Young, and it is chiefly remarkable for the magisterial airs assumed by a critic so fearfully and wonderfully ignorant of the subject with which he deals that he believes the blood-corpuscles to be produced by evaporation of the blood![1] The following extracts will, however, leave no doubt that, even to so unprepared an apprehension, Mr. Darwin's language was plain enough:
"This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some individual ens, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us" (p. 231).
"If, with Mr. Darwin, to escape the difficulty of supposing the first man at his creation to possess in that framework of his body 'false marks of nourishment from his mother's womb,' with Mr. Darwin you consider him to have been an improved ape" (p. 253).
"First, then, he (Mr. Darwin) not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to Man himself, as well as to the animals around him" (p. 257).
Exactly fourteen years after this distinct testimony to the plainness of Mr. Darwin's speech on these matters, last July, namely, the very same Review had an article entitled "Primitive Man." Possessed by a blind animosity against all things Darwinian, the writer of this paper outrages decency by insinuations against Mr. George Darwin, well calculated to damage a little-known man with the public, though they sound droll enough to those who are acquainted with my able and excellent friend's somewhat ascetic habits; and, by way of preparation for the attack upon the son, the anonymous reviewer charges the father with deliberate duplicity:
"It is one of the calamities of our time and country that unbelievers, instead of, as in France, honestly avowing their sentiments, disguise them by studious reticence—as Mr. Darwin disguised, at first, his views as to the bestiality of man" (loc. cit., p. 63).
Messieurs the Reviewers, you diametrically contradict one another, and one of you must bear the responsibility of a direct and deliberate untruth: which is it? The one who, writing in July, 1860, said there was no obscurity about Mr. Darwin's views on this matter? Or the one who, writing in July, 1874, accuses him of having at first disguised his views? Settle it between yourselves. If it were necessary for me to give an opinion on so delicate a matter, assuredly I could have no ground for hesitation. For, on becoming acquainted with Mr. Darwin's views in 1858, I set myself to inquire, much more seriously than I had done before, whether the hiatus between man and apes, indicated
- ↑ The passage is worth embalming: "Or what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?" (loc. cit., p. 247).
