However, I was wrong, and I duly apologise.
(2) He accuses me of having put into his mouth the words “climbing up the family tree,” as applied to the embryo; which words, as a fact, he never used. Here, again, I am to blame—not, indeed, for having said that Mr. Wells used words which he never used, but for not having written with that clarity which the occasion demanded. I had no intention of saying that Mr. Wells had used this particular phrase himself. I quoted it between inverted commas, not because I ascribed it to himself, but because it was a sort of current slang phrase familiar enough when Mr. Wells and I were young and were both being taught the nonsense which he still so loyally defends.
The idea was that the embryo reproduced in various stages of its development the various stages of its ancestry in the evolutionary process. The proper scientific term for this conception or theory is “Recapitulation.” To this theory of Recapitulation Mr. Wells amply commits himself in his book. He brings it out specifically in connection with man. How his allusions to Recapitulation look in the light of modern scientific work we shall see in a moment. The particular point here is that he did not use the particular phrase “climbing up the family tree.” He did not, and I never intended to say that he did. I readily apologise for any misconception that may have arisen on that head. But I confess I cannot for the life of me see how the matter can be of the least importance!
Supposing Mr. Wells were to write a criticism of my book, Europe and the Faith, and were to say, “Mr. Belloc is for ever referring the main institutions of Europe to the Roman Empire,” and then were to add, out of his wide acquaintance with French literature, that fine expression from Verlaine, “O Rome! O Mère!”
I don’t think I should rush into print and protest that I had been abominably maligned. I should say that I was not the author of the expression (if anybody bothered to ask me), but that it put my opinion more tersely than I could have put it myself.
However, if Mr. Wells cannot bear the misunderstanding, he will be relieved to know that in my book I have got rid of it by the simple process of adding the words “as it was called in Mr. Wells’s youth and mine” before the offending phrase (and a very good epigrammatic one it is) “climbing up the family tree.”
(3) Mr. Wells complains that I accuse him of not having read Vialleton, and brings forward, in triumphant proof of my own ignorance of that great scientist, the fact that I passed an error in proof, allowing “Vailleton” to stand for “Vialleton.”
Here it is I that must defend myself.
I bought Vialleton’s great book (which is a destructive criticism of Darwinism of a 17-inch calibre) the week in which it came out, and have consulted it ever since. If Mr. Wells is reduced for ammunition to the picking out of one misprint in some hundred thousand words of matter, he must be in a terrible way.
But on the attached point, that I accuse him of never having read Vialleton, and that (as Mr. Wells himself roundly affirms) Vialleton does not knock Recapitulation sideways, I can only repeat that I have made no error at all; but that, on the contrary, it is clear Mr. Wells has never read the book, and probably never heard of it until he saw the name quoted in my criticism. Had he really read Vialleton he could not have had the face to pretend that this great authority did not oppose the old-fashioned views Mr. Wells was putting forward.