ineteenth century, steeped in a meddling, presumptuous,
reading-and-writing, socially and politically powerful ignorance
inconceivable by Thomas Aquinas or even Roger Bacon, was incapable of
so convenient an arrangement; and science was strangled by bigoted
ignoramuses claiming infallibility for their interpretation of the
Bible, which was regarded, not as a literature nor even as a book, but
partly as an oracle which answered and settled all questions, and partly
as a talisman to be carried by soldiers in their breast pockets or
placed under the pillows of persons who were afraid of ghosts. The tract
shops exhibited in their windows bullet-dinted testaments, mothers'
gifts to their soldier sons whose lives had been saved by it; for the
muzzle-loaders of those days could not drive a projectile through so
many pages.

THE MOMENT AND THE MAN

This superstition of a continual capricious disorder in nature, of a
lawgiver who was also a lawbreaker, made atheists in all directions
among clever and lightminded people. But atheism did not account for
Paley's watch. Atheism accounted for nothing; and it was the business of
science to account for everything that was plainly accountable. Science
had no use for mere negation: what was desired by it above all things
just then was a demonstration that the evidences of design could be
explained without resort to the hypothesis of a personal designer. If
only some genius, whilst admitting Paley's facts, could knock the brains
out of Paley by the discovery of a method whereby watches could happen
without watchmakers, that genius was assured of such a welcome from the
thought of his day as no natural philosopher had ever enjoyed before.

The time being thus ripe, the genius appeared; and his name was Charles
Darwin. And now, what did Darwin really discover?

Here, I am afraid, I shall require once more the assistance of the
giraffe, or, as he was called in the days of the celebrated Buffoon,
the camelopard (by children, cammyleopard). I do not remember how this
animal imposed himself illustratively on the Evolution controversy; but
there was no getting away from him then; and I am old-fashioned enough
to be unable to get away from him now. How did he come by his long neck?
Lamarck would have said, by wanting to get at the tender leaves high
up on the tree, and trying until he succeeded in wishing the necessary
length of neck into existence. Another answer was also possible: namely,