"The writer takes to his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious ignorance, that strikes the keynote of our existing criticism. Men write without taking the trouble to read or think."[377]
The 'Saturday Review' attacked 'Evolution, Old and New,' I may almost say savagely. It wrote: "When Mr. Butler's 'Life and Habit' came before us, we doubted whether his ambiguously expressed speculations belonged to the regions of playful but possibly scientific imagination, or of unscientific fancies; and we gave him the benefit of the doubt. In fact, we strained a point or two to find a reasonable meaning for him. He has now settled the question against himself. Not professing to have any particular competence in biology, natural history, or the scientific study of evidence in any shape whatever, and, indeed, rather glorying in his freedom from any such superfluities, he undertakes to assure the overwhelming majority of men of science, and the educated public who have followed their lead, that, while they have done well to be converted to the doctrine of the evolution and transmutation of species, they have been converted on entirely wrong grounds."
. . . . . . . . . . .
"When a writer who has not given as many weeks to the subject as Mr. Darwin has given years [as a matter of fact, it is now twenty years since I began to publish on the subject of Evolution] is not content to air his own crude, though clever, fallacies, but presumes to criticize Mr. Darwin with the superciliousness of a young schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves or perhaps desires. One would think that Mr. Butler was the travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the pert speculator, who takes all his facts at secondhand."
. . . . . . . . . . .
"Let us once more consider how matters stood a year or two before the 'Origin of Species' first appeared. The continuous evolution of animated Nature had in its favour the difficulty of drawing fixed lines between species and even larger divisions, all the indications of comparative anatomy and embryology, and a good deal of general scientific presumption. Several well-known writers, and some eminent enough to command respect, had expressed their belief in it. One or two far-seeing thinkers, among whom the place of honour must be assigned to Mr. Herbert Spencer, had done more. They had used their philosophic insight, which, to science, is the eye of faith, to descry the promised land almost within reach; they knew and announced how rich and spacious the heritage would be, if once the entry could be made good. But on that 'if' everything hung. Nature was not bound to give up her secret, or was bound only in a mocking covenant with an impossible condition: Si cælum digito tetigeris; if only some fortunate hand could touch the inaccessible firmament, and bring down the golden chain to earth! But fruition seemed out of sight. Even those who were most willing to advance in this direction, could only regret that they saw no road clear. There was a tempting vision, but nothing proven—many would have said nothing provable. A few years passed, and all this was changed. The doubtful speculation had become a firm and connected theory. In the room of scattered foragers and scouts, there was an irresistibly advancing column. Nature had surrendered her stronghold, and was disarmed of her secret. And if we ask who were the men by whom this was done, the answer is notorious, and there is but one answer possible: the names that are for ever associated with this great triumph are those of Charles Darwin and Wallace."[378]
I gave the lady or gentleman who wrote this an opportunity of acknowledging the authorship; but she or he preferred, not I think unnaturally, to remain anonymous.
The only other criticism of 'Evolution, Old and New,' to which I would call attention, appeared in 'Nature,' in a review of 'Unconscious Memory,' by Mr. Romanes, and contained the following passages:—
"But to be serious, if in charity we could deem Mr. Butler a lunatic, we should not be unprepared for any aberration of common sense that he might display.... A certain nobody writes a book ['Evolution, Old and New'] accusing the most illustrious man in his generation of burying the claims of certain illustrious predecessors out of the sight of all men. In the hope of gaining some notoriety by deserving, and perhaps receiving a contemptuous refutation from the eminent man in question, he publishes this book which, if it deserved serious consideration, would be not more of an insult to the particular man of science whom it accuses of conscious and wholesale plagiarism [there is no such accusation in 'Evolution, Old and New'] than it would be to men of science in general for requiring such elementary instruction on some of the most famous literature in science from an upstart ignoramus, who, until two or three years ago, considered himself a painter by profession."—'Nature,' Jan. 27, 1881.