Mr. Wells is foolish enough—and ignorant enough—to say that this leading European authority, one of the greatest living authorities on his subject, “may have seen fit in one of his works” (my italics) to set right some “French student” (why French?) who had imagined that the embryo reproduced in detail all its ancestral life.
I might as well say that Darwin “may” in some one of his works have seen fit to set right some English student who imagined all animals to have been created out of mud in a week.
Why! the whole of that great book is nothing but one continuous bombardment of everything—let alone Recapitulation—which Mr. Wells was taught in his youth.
He will hear all about it in my book, and I am sure that he will wish, when he reads what modern science really says, that he had never talked about things of which he knows so little.
(4) He complains that I have abused him for stating as dogma (with large diagrams) Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation as propounded—thirty-three years ago!—by Sir Robert Ball. But I did right to expose anything so monstrous. Not that astronomical factors may not, or rather must not, have been at work; but that the particular theory which he puts forward for his innocent readers as admitted scientific fact, has been dead and done for since 1894. Surely one has a right in 1926 to point out that the popular teacher laying down in that year as fact an hypothesis which was exploded over thirty years ago should be exposed.
(5) He says that I have attacked him for not accepting the theory that times of high glaciation were also times of high sea-level, and vice versa. He says that he has followed in this authorities later than the authorities of twenty years ago which I quoted.
He is perfectly right. I owe him an apology for this, and when my book comes out the passage shall be wholly modified in consonance with recent work. I over-emphasised the certitude of Boule and others; I admit that the point is in doubt and ought not to be treated as certain. Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certain upon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful (as, for instance, in the latest work of all, Professor Coleman), but that does not excuse me for having been too positive on my own side.
(6) The last accusation Mr. Wells brings against me is that I misrepresent him in similar fashion upon two points, the Neanderthal quality of the Tasmanians (now extinct) and the use of the bow by Paleolithic Man.
As both these accusations turn on the same point (to wit, whether I was justified in reading confused writing as I did), they are essentially one accusation, and I will treat them as such.
In the matter of the bow being used by late Paleolithic Man the position is this.