ce of evolution, but it
affects the view we take of life and things in an endless variety of most
interesting and important ways. It is imperative, therefore, on those
who take any interest in these matters, to place side by side in the
clearest contrast the views of those who refer the evolution of species
mainly to accumulation of variations that have no other inception than
chance, and of that older school which makes design perceive and develop
still further the goods that chance provides.

But over and above this, which would be in itself sufficient, the
historical mode of studying any question is the only one which will
enable us to comprehend it effectually. The personal element cannot be
eliminated from the consideration of works written by living persons for
living persons. We want to know who is who--whom we can depend upon to
have no other end than the making things clear to himself and his
readers, and whom we should mistrust as having an ulterior aim on which
he is more intent than on the furthering of our better understanding. We
want to know who is doing his best to help us, and who is only trying to
make us help him, or to bolster up the system in which his interests are
vested. There is nothing that will throw more light upon these points
than the way in which a man behaves towards those who have worked in the
same field with himself, and, again, than his style. A man's style, as
Buffon long since said, is the man himself. By style, I do not, of
course, mean grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again
said that it is like happiness, and _vient de la douceur de l'ame_. When
we find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences
that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we should a
fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to steal our watch. We often
cannot judge of the truth or falsehood of facts for ourselves, but we
most of us know enough of human nature to be able to tell a good witness
from a bad one.

However this may be, and whatever we may think of judging systems by the
directness or indirectness of those who advance them, biologists, having
committed themselves too rashly, would have been more than human if they
had not shown some pique towards those who dared to say, first, that the
theory of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace was unworkable; and secondly, that
even though it were workable it would not justify either of them in
claiming evolution.