But these newspaper scribes don’t take the trouble to understand what they read.

[While at Bournemouth he also finished and sent off to the “Youth’s Companion,” an American paper, an article on the evolution of certain types of the house, called “From the Hut to the Pantheon.”  Beginning with a description of the Pantheon, that characteristically Roman work with its vast dome, so strongly built that it is the only great dome remaining without a flaw:—­]

For a long time [he says] I was perplexed to know what it was about the proportions of the interior of the Pantheon which gave me such a different feeling from that made by any other domed space I had ever entered.

[The secret of this he finds in the broad and simple design peculiar to the building, and then shows in detail how:—­]

The round hut, the Aedes Vestae, and the Pantheon are so many stages in a process of architectural evolution which was effected between the first beginnings of Roman history and the Augustan age.

[The relation between the beehive hut, the terremare, and the pile-dwellings of Italy lead to many suggestive bits of early anthropology, which, it may be hoped, bore fruit in the minds of some of his youthful readers.

We find him also reading over proofs for Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, although he might hesitate to ask for his criticism with respect to a subject on which they had a “standing difference,” still:—­

concluded that to break through the long-standing usage, in pursuance of which I have habitually submitted my biological writing to your castigation, and so often profited by so doing, would seem like a distrust of your candour—­a distrust which I cannot entertain.

So he wrote in January; and on March 19 he wrote again, with another set of proofs:—­

Toujours l’audace!  More proofs to look over.  Don’t write a critical essay, only marginal notes.  Perhaps you will say, like the Roman poet to the poetaster who asked him to erase any passages he did not like, and who replied, “One erasure will suffice”—­perhaps you will say, “There needs only one marginal note.”

To this he received answer:—­]

Casalini, W. Bournemouth, March 22, 1886.

My dear Spencer,

More power to your elbow!  You will find my blessing at the end of the proof.

But please look very carefully at some comments which are not merely sceptical criticisms, but deal with matters of fact.

I see the difference between us on the speculative question lies in the conception of the primitive protoplasm.  I conceive it as a mechanism set going by heat—­as a sort of active crystal with the capacity of giving rise to a great number of pseudomorphs; and I conceive that external conditions favour one or the other pseudomorph, but leave the fundamental mechanism untouched.

You appear to me to suppose that external conditions modify the machinery, as if by transferring a flour-mill into a forest you could make it into a saw-mill I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything—­especially as I am now so much occupied with theology—­but I don’t see my way to your conclusion.