[Footnote 1:  Including under this head hereditary transmission.]

In some respects, finally, I can only characterize the Quarterly Reviewer’s treatment of Mr. Darwin as alike unjust and unbecoming.  Language of this strength requires justification, and on that ground I add the remarks which follow.

The Quarterly Reviewer opens his essay by a careful enumeration of all those points upon which, during the course of thirteen years of incessant labour, Mr. Darwin has modified his opinions.  It has often and justly been remarked, that what strikes a candid student of Mr. Darwin’s works is not so much his industry, his knowledge, or even the surprising fertility of his inventive genius; but that unswerving truthfulness and honesty which never permit him to hide a weak place, or gloss over a difficulty, but lead him, on all occasions, to point out the weak places in his own armour, and even sometimes, it appears to me, to make admissions against himself which are quite unnecessary.  A critic who desires to attack Mr. Darwin has only to read his works with a desire to observe, not their merits, but their defects, and he will find, ready to hand, more adverse suggestions than are likely ever to have suggested themselves to his own sharpness, without Mr. Darwin’s self-denying aid.

Now this quality of scientific candour is not so common that it needs to be discouraged; and it appears to me to deserve other treatment than that adopted by the Quarterly Reviewer, who deals with Mr. Darwin as an Old Bailey barrister deals with a man against whom he wishes to obtain a conviction, per fas aut nefas, and opens his case by endeavouring to create a prejudice against the prisoner in the minds of the jury.  In his eagerness to carry out this laudable design, the Quarterly Reviewer cannot even state the history of the doctrine of natural selection without an oblique and entirely unjustifiable attempt to depreciate Mr. Darwin.  “To Mr. Darwin,” says he, “and (through Mr. Wallace’s reticence) to Mr. Darwin alone, is due the credit of having first brought it prominently forward and demonstrated its truth.”  No one can less desire than I do, to throw a doubt upon Mr. Wallace’s originality, or to question his claim to the honour of being one of the originators of the doctrine of natural selection; but the statement that Mr. Darwin has the sole credit of originating the doctrine because of Mr. Wallace’s reticence is simply ridiculous.  The proof of this is, in the first place, afforded by Mr. Wallace himself, whose noble freedom from petty jealousy in this matter, smaller folk would do well to imitate; and who writes thus:—­“I have felt all my life, and I still feel, the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me, and that it was not left for me to attempt to write the ‘Origin of Species.’  I have long since measured my own strength, and know well that it would be quite unequal to that task.”  So that