I have no quarrel with ignorance of this kind, as such. There is no particular reason why any general writer, myself or Mr. Wells, or Jones or Brown or Robinson, should have even this amount of knowledge on a special department of modern science. But then, if he hasn’t, he shouldn’t write about it; still less should he say that the authorities alluded to don’t exist—that their names cannot be quoted, because there are none, and that the arguments advanced by me were made up by an ignorant man who had no expert work from which to quote.

Now that last sentence leads me to yet another thrust of the battering ram which I am bringing against poor Mr. Wells. He says that the arguments I have advanced against Natural Selection are of my own imagining.

So the arguments I have put forward (only a few main arguments out of many) were made up out of my own head, and have no support from authority? I have no acquaintance with the names or general conclusions of any experts in these affairs? It would be, indeed, astonishing if I had acted thus, seeing that nothing was easier than for me to write to any friend engaged in biological study and get the amplest information. I did not do so, because there was no necessity to do so. That liberal education—which Mr. Wells derides—was sufficient.

Really, Mr. Wells here flatters me too much! He does not know that the arguments were not mine but the main arguments which have been set forward by a host of competent authorities, and which have proved so damaging that even the remaining defenders of Darwinism have had to modify their position.

Thus my first argument is the well-known one of accident being quite unable to explain the co-ordination of variations necessary to adaptation.

The point is this, that not only one accidental advantageous variation which might give an animal a better chance of survival has to be considered, but the general adaptation of all the organism to new conditions; not only that, but the marvellous adaptation of thousands upon thousands of special relations within complex organisms such as are the higher animals. Left to chance, such co-ordination would be impossible. The chance of a vast number of favourable variations all arriving together by accident approximates to zero. It is a mere matter of arithmetic.

That argument in Mr. Wells’s judgment is “burlesque,” “beautifully absurd,” and so forth. But the judgment is not passed on him by me (who make no pretence to anything but the most general reading on these affairs). It is passed by such an authority, for instance, as Wolff. It is clear that Mr. Wells has never heard of Wolff; yet it is, I believe, now nearly eighteen years since Wolff brought out this argument, and for all I know many another clear-headed man had preceded him; certainly a great many have followed.

I do not pretend to have read Wolff; I have not. But I have read the significant quotations from him, and even if I had not done so I should, as a man of general education, have known at least what his position was. Shall I quote a single (translated) sentence? (Mr. Wells with his wide command of languages may look it up in the original, called, I believe, Beitrage zur Kritik der Darwinischen Lehre):—

“One could possibly imagine a gradual development of the adaptation between one muscle-cell and one nerve-ending, through selection among an infinity of chance-made variations; but that such shall take place coincidently in time and character in hundreds or thousands of cases in one organism is inconceivable.”

My second argument is equally a commonplace with educated men, and in saying that I am the author of it Mr. Wells is again flattering me a great deal too much, and again betraying his own astonishing lack of acquaintance with the subject he professes to teach.