directly or indirectly, are determined by it. Nay, even in that respect, certain limits which we may observe require or demand a particular explanation.

The quarry, namely, which for our purposes we lay very specially under contribution, is, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by his son, Francis Darwin (seventh thousand, revised, 1888). But the other relative works--as the Origin of Species, the Descent of Man, the Expression of the Emotions, together with that admirable volume, the Journal of Researches have lain with us equally continuously at hand. As is well known, of theories of evolution in existence, there are more than one; and, in quotation from Mr. Darwin himself, there has been, partially, to this effect, already testimony (Lamarck shall have "done the subject harm, as has Mr. Vestiges, and as- some future naturalist will perhaps say has Mr. D."). The theorists under the two former names do not seem to desire us to understand that they are in disagreement with the belief in the existence of design; and as for Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who, according to the Krause-book, shall have anticipated and preceded his grandson in every single element of the latter's theory except one, selection, namely, as the special lever of the necessary modification, he, for his part, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, must be acknowledged to have been surpassed by no other such writer (if by any at all) in the reality of his reverence for design. But in this reference it is far otherwise with natural selection; and that is one reason why we prefer here the Life and Letters as the relative quarry of what for discussion is concerned. Respective silence or concealment, evasion or disguise-nothing of the sort is to be found there; there, on the contrary, all that relates to design is matter of express statement and open discourse.

Another reason is the superiority in simplicity and clearness of the familiar, everyday explanation to what shall be the full-length exposition, so to speak, of formality and purpose. Lastly, the chief reason is perhaps this that depends partly on the matter and partly on the form of the great book, the Origin, itself. The matter, for example, is greatly in excess of all that is required for the specialty of the theory in question. We may see as much as that very clearly if we but look from the one statement to the other. In the Letters, which are seen to have been written with no other intention, the most of them, than to win over to his doctrine such naturalists of repute as Sir Charles Lyell, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Dr. Asa Gray, it is that doctrine, and in its own constitutive moments, that by Mr. Darwin is alone discussed. He names indeed there also "the affinities, embryology, rudimentary organs, geological history, and geographical distribution of organic beings;" but he only names them-only names them so-so as I quote. It is in the Origin that he treats expressly and at full of each of these topics,with the result that they largely are the matter of the book. Now the fact is that all these topics belong, on the whole, quite as much to all other evolutionary doctrines as to that of Darwin. Nay, let us but consider this, that, under a general creationary theory,before any one evolutionary doctrine, Lamarckian, Vestigian, Erasmo-Darwinian, Carlo-Darwinian, or other, came up, never, whether in affinities, or embryology, or geology, or geography, or even rudimentary organs, was there a single difficulty felt, let us but consider this I say, and it will be plain to be seen that all that concerns affinities and the rest constitutes no fee-simple that shall be proper and peculiar to natural selection alone. The opposing doctrine that upheld creation

itself was not anomalistic, but always homologistic: it saw affinity and plan throughout all that lives. Mr. Darwin himself tells us of this in his Journal (p. 94). When he wrote then (in 1833), he had never a doubt of "the grand scheme, common to the present and past ages, on which organised beings have been created." Mr. Darwin's Reviewers just seem to have been similarly influenced; for he is perpetually grumbling at the whole of them for their neglect of the sacred affinities, geologies, geographies, etc. Yet what is his own example? His Lyells, Hookers, and Grays, as we have said, are all cheerfully let off for the affinities, etc., but they are pinned to variation and selection.

So far of the matter, then-as a matter common to all, it may be allowably, and for result, innocuously, omitted from consideration here, where it is what is specially Carlo-Darwinian that is alone in question,— where it is not so much evolution (certainly as a process in some form genuine) that is the subject contemplated, as only on the whole what is generally understood to be the Darwinian scheme of natural selection.

A like reason applies to the form of the book. That form is a compilation. Lyell, Hooker, Asa Gray, and Mr. Darwin himself rank as, and are, workers in science; and so it happens that, in the course of the correspondence that occupies the three volumes of the Life and Letters, the reader is made to understand that, among workers, compilers are but as objects of scoff. "To judge on a subject on which one knows nothing: compilers," says Mr. Darwin significantly, "must do this to a certain extent (you know I value and rank high compilers, being one myself)!" These words are plain, if jocose; and others such repeatedly occur in the same volumes, as, for example (ii. 97), these: "I sometimes despise myself as a poor compiler;" and again: "I have been led to

despise and laugh at myself as a compiler." But the best proof of the nature of his proceedings proper, compilation namely, lies in his own special description of them

"In July (1837) I opened my first note-book for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, and never ceased working for the next twenty years"—"From September 1854 I devoted my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes". "I collected facts on a wholesale scale, by printed inquiries, by conversation with breeders and gardeners, and by extensive reading; when I see the list of books of all kinds which I read and abstracted, including whole series of journals and transactions, I am surprised at my industry"-" In 1856 I began to write out my views, on a scale three or four times as extensive as that which was afterwards followed in my Origin of Species; yet it was only an abstract of the materials which I had collected ”—“Had I published on the scale in which I began to write, the book would have been four or five times as large as the Origin" (and yet have remained, as said, "itself only an 'abstract"). "An immense number of facts collected from various sources "—"In several of my books, facts observed by others have been very extensively used "—"I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios, in cabinets with labelled shelves"-"I have bought many books, and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work ""Of abstracts I have a large drawer full." These extracts are from the so-called "Autobiographical Chapter;" and all through the three volumes confirmatory expressions, direct and indirect, occur. Even as late as May 1880 (iii. 333) we have this: "Making notes on separate pieces of paper, I keep several scores of large portfolios, arranged on very thin shelves about two inches apart, and each shelf has its proper name or title; and I can thus put every memorandum into its proper place." We recollect, too, how, in regard to indexes, and in this direction generally, he put Buckle to profit: "I was very glad to learn from him his system of collecting facts." A compiler could but with some eagerness hail a compiler. Mr. Francis Darwin, too, in his Reminiscences, gives us much information to the same effect (i. 150–153).

Now, no doubt it belongs to a compiler both carefully to collect his facts and equally carefully to sift them; nor is Mr. Darwin without testimony to himself in either

respect. In a letter to Mr. Huxley (ii. 281, note), he writes: "The inaccuracy of the blessed gang (of which I am one) of compilers passes all bounds-I must show how we jolly fellows work;" and then follows an account of a circumstance which, in its triple rise of descriptive perversion, falls very little short of the successive stages of the three black crows. Just at the end of the Autobiographical Chapter, too, he records three cases of false statement of facts which, as such as are calculated to stultify compilers, he himself was the means of exposing. What in a way is a fourth case concerns the funny story of the bean-pod: "The beans this year have all grown on the wrong side!" All over England, newspaper after newspaper caught up the cry. Only Mr. Darwin's own gardener was too knowing a man to be taken in. no, sir," he said, "it must be a mistake, for the beans grow on the wrong side only on leap-year, and this is not leap-year!"

"Oh

Mr. Darwin, however, with all his wakefulness, is still, he says (i. 104), "not very sceptical;" and he feels sure that other scientific men have suffered in their inquiries just by being so. There is even not altogether absent on the outside, so to speak, a sort of feeling that Mr. Darwin I really have heard as much, and by experts, more than once said- was somewhat easy" in the accounts which as a compiler he received. When one considers of it, indeed, something such seems not unlikely to have been the state of the case. It is quite certain (as will be clearer in the sequel) that there was no wish nearer his soul than the establishment of the physical origin of species. Every jot, and dot, and tittle of evidence that could be construed to make in any way for the end he wished was eagerly accepted-witness Hearne !

Who was he, Hearne ?-who was that Hearne, the sole