At the same time it must be admitted that the popularisation of science, whether by lecture or essay, has its drawbacks. Success in this department has its perils for those who succeed. The "people who fail" take their revenge, as we have recently had occasion to observe, by ignoring all the rest of a man's work and glibly labelling him a mere populariser. If the falsehood were not too glaring, they would say the same of Faraday and Helmholtz and Kelvin.
Of the affliction caused by persons who think that what they have picked up from popular exposition qualifies them for discussing the great problems of science, it may be said, as the Radical toast said of the power of the Crown in bygone days, that it "has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished." The oddities of "English as she is spoke" might be abundantly paralleled by those of "Science as she is misunderstood" in the sermon, the novel, and the leading article; and a collection of the grotesque travesties of scientific conceptions, in the shape of essays on such trifles as "the Nature of Life" and the "Origin of All Things," which reach me, from time to time, might well be bound up with them.
The essay on Geological Reform unfortunately brought me, I will not say into collision, but into a position of critical remonstrance with regard to some charges of physical heterodoxy, brought by my distinguished friend Lord Kelvin, against British Geology. As President of the Geological Society of London at that time (1869), I thought I might venture to plead that we were not such heretics as we seemed to be; and that, even if we were, recantation would not affect the question of evolution.
I am glad to see that Lord Kelvin has just reprinted his reply to my plea, and I refer the reader to it. I shall not presume to question anything, that on such ripe consideration, Lord Kelvin has to say upon the physical problems involved. But I may remark that no one can have asserted more strongly than I have done, the necessity of looking to physics and mathematics, for help in regard to the earliest history of the globe.
And I take the opportunity of repeating the opinion that, whether what we call geological time has the lower limit assigned to it by Lord Kelvin, or the higher assumed by other philosophers; whether the germs of all living things have originated in the globe itself, or whether they have been imported on, or in, meteorites from without, the problem of the origin of those successive Faunæ and Floræ of the earth, the existence of which is fully demonstrated by palæontology, remains exactly where it was.
For I think it will be admitted, that the germs brought to us by meteorites, if any, were not ova of elephants, nor of crocodiles; not cocoa-nuts nor acorns; not even eggs of shell-fish and corals; but only those of the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life. Therefore, since it is proved that, from a very remote epoch of geological time, the earth has been peopled by a continual succession of the higher forms of animals and plants, these either must have been created, or they have arisen by evolution. And in respect of certain groups of animals, the well-established facts of palæontology leave no rational doubt that they arose by the latter method.
In the second place, there are no data whatever, which justify the biologist in assigning any, even approximately definite, period of time, either long or short, to the evolution of one species from another by the process of variation and selection. In the essay on Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life I have taken pains to prove that the change of animals has gone on at very different rates in different groups of living beings; that some types have persisted with little change from the palæozoic epoch till now, while others have changed rapidly within the limits of an epoch. In 1862 (see Coll. Ess. viii. pp. 303, 304) in 1863 (vol. ii., p. 461) and again in 1864 (ibid., pp. 89-91) I argued, not as a matter of speculation, but from palæontological facts, the bearing of which I believe, up to that time, had not been shown, that any adequate hypothesis of the causes of evolution must be consistent with progression, stationariness and retrogression, of the same type at different epochs; of different types in the same epoch; and that Darwin's hypothesis fulfilled these conditions.
According to that hypothesis, two factors are at work, variation and selection. Next to nothing is known of the causes of the former process; nothing whatever of the time required for the production of a certain amount of deviation from the existing type. And, as respects selection, which operates by extinguishing all but a small minority of variations, we have not the slightest means of estimating the rapidity with which it does its work. All that we are justified in saying is that the rate at which it takes place may vary almost indefinitely. If the famous paint-root of Florida, which kills white pigs but not black ones, were abundant and certain in its action, black pigs might be substituted for white in the course of two or three years. If, on the other hand, it was rare and uncertain in action, the white pigs might linger on for centuries.