I say that in a man professing to teach popular science, this degree of ignorance is quite inexcusable.[[3]]
[3]. Not to crowd these pages too much, I have relegated to a short appendix at the end of this volume authorities and criticisms which the readers may consult for examples of insufficient reading on the part of our Author.
CHAPTER III
MR. WELLS AND THE FALL OF MAN
As we approach the problem of Man it behoves us, before dealing with Mr. Wells’s views on that animal, to examine a little further his competence as a teacher of Science to the multitude.
I have pointed out that where Mr. Wells has to deal with ascertained facts he is not only an accurate but an excellent précis writer, and that his summary of such facts as are contained in our older books of reference is clear, vivid, and in good proportion.
But the judgment of evidence is very badly done, the reasoning weak and yielding to imagination; while the theories supported and the positive errors repeated are most of them years and years behind the times.
I will give examples.
In the course of his account of Evolution Mr. Wells repeats (on page 37) with complete confidence, as though it were scientific fact, the old and now worthless theory called “Recapitulation.” It was a theory invented by Haeckel (about 1870) purporting to be based on the work done by Von Baer more than 40 years earlier—though, as a fact, Haeckel characteristically suppressed one of Baer’s four points.
The Theory of Recapitulation was as follows:—The embryo—in particular of man—bears witness to transformism by showing as it develops one phase after another of its ancestral past: as the current phrase went when Mr. Wells and I were young, it “climbs up its family tree.” It was imagined that the embryo represents as it grows the various stages, from the original aquatic life onwards to general tetrapodal forms, then to more immediate ancestors from which the present form of the animal came. Vialleton of Montpellier, probably the greatest contemporary authority in Europe on Embryology, has disproved the theory and left it wrecked. He has knocked the last nail into the coffin of that facile and superficial short-cut (and blind alley). Here again I must make myself quite clear, for Mr. Wells’s tendency to confusion of mind (a defect attaching, perhaps, to his deservedly famous gift of imagination) may easily make him accuse me of opinions I do not hold.
I do not make this allusion to the great work of Vialleton (which I have had by me since it came out and which I study with increasing admiration) as a criticism of Evolution in general. Who could? I allude to it because Mr. Wells’s ignorance of its existence is inexcusable in a man proposing to deal with such subjects even in the most summary and popular fashion. That Mr. Wells does, as a fact, know nothing of Vialleton’s mass of instance and argument, and its modern effect, is clear from a protest he issued against me just before the publication of this book. He there said that perhaps some French student had believed the embryo to repeat its ancestry “conscientiously,” and that Vialleton “may have thought it well to discuss this idea in one of his books”!