Sir,—Your amiable and earnest correspondent does not seem to understand that men like Darwin and Wallace, who have spent years of patient labour and thought in amassing observations of nature, and grouping together the facts out of which their theories have been formed, have a right to ‘an air of philosophical superiority,’ if they choose to display it, when questions are asked or arguments put forward which imply ignorance or misconception of all they have been doing in the interests of science. When Mr. Wallace ‘very coolly’ asserts that he sees no force in an argument, it will as a rule be advisable for the argument either to withdraw itself from the public gaze, or get itself stated a little more lucidly. Again, when Mr. Darwin ‘rashly affirms that he has distinct evidence’ of a thing, it would perhaps be a good plan to get the Commissioners in Lunacy to examine the astonishing number of hard-headed men whom he induces to believe his unfounded assertion.

But now that I have prevailed with your correspondent to give up ‘denouncing’ Darwinism, I wish further to press upon him the advantage of ceasing to ‘deny’ it, and, above all, of ceasing to deny it with any admixture of religious phraseology in his denial. He has himself allowed that sciences, seemingly most at variance with the language of Scripture, have come to be reconciled with it; he must see, therefore, that the appearances of Scriptural language can be no objection to Darwinism or to any other scientific theory whatever. Darwinism is founded on the comparison of an enormous number of well-ascertained facts issuing in a few generalizations of extreme importance if true, but also of considerable importance, even if far short of the truth. Every hypothesis which will explain a large number of hitherto disconnected facts, though it may be in itself erroneous, helps and guides men in the end towards the true explanation. To ‘deny,’ or, in other words, to make a public protest against such hypotheses without having anything better or equal, or a tenth part as good to offer in their stead, is to be a hinderer of science, and, instead of being really pious and reverent, is a very pretty, though doubtless unconscious imitation of that rhetoric which, because of the acknowledged difficulties in every form of religion, ‘denies’ religion altogether.

That your correspondent does lay just a little tiny claim to infallibility is clear from the very letter in which he modestly disowns it: for he therein prays always to be enabled to think and act about the interpretation of Scripture as he now thinks and acts, which would be a foolish prayer, if his present thoughts and actions might possibly be wrong or misguided. And yet he differs from a very large number of divines, in supposing that the prophets, for instance, knew all that their own prophecies portended; so that if all those worthy divines be right in assuming that the inspired writers did not always ‘know what they wrote about,’ then your correspondent, who makes the contrary supposition, must be wrong,—and there will still be some hope for Darwinism.

It is scarcely fair to ask for space to answer his momentous challenge about the first vertebrate, or to explain the thoroughly sceptical form which the challenge assumes. When the Apostle Thomas said, ‘except I see the print of the nails, I will not believe,’ he had no logical claim to receive the proof of the resurrection which he demanded, because a priori it would have been quite fair to suppose our Lord’s resurrection-body would retain no such signs of previous outrage; and it is a kindred mistake to suppose that the truth of the development-theory in any way hinges upon the possibility of constructing an effigy of the first vertebrate either as it actually was, or to suit an anti-Darwinian’s notions of what it ought to have been. According to the development-theory, it must have been the product of innumerable antecedent factors, itself the heir of many far-descended and often modified characters; and yet, for all that, it will probably have been a far simpler organism than the simplest modern vertebrate. It is well known by what insensible gradations the natural kingdoms and the classes in those great divisions pass, so to speak, into one another; it need, therefore, cause no surprise if the primary vertebrate of all the vertebrates should prove neither to have been fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring; but for an actual specimen of a living vertebrate that can neither ‘swim, crawl, fly, nor walk,’ I cannot do better than refer my philosophical opponent to a new-born baby.