When biologists show pique at all they generally
show a good deal of pique, but pique or no pique, they shunned Mr.
Spencer's objection above referred to with a persistency more unanimous
and obstinate than I ever remember to have seen displayed even by
professional truth-seekers. I find no rejoinder to it from Mr. Darwin
himself, between 1865 when it was first put forward, and 1882 when Mr.
Darwin died. It has been similarly "ostrichised" by all the leading
apologists of Darwinism, so far at least as I have been able to observe,
and I have followed the matter closely for many years. Mr. Spencer has
repeated and amplified it in his recent work, "The Factors of Organic
Evolution," but it still remains without so much as an attempt at serious
answer, for the perfunctory and illusory remarks of Mr. Wallace at the
end of his "Darwinism" cannot be counted as such. The best proof of its
irresistible weight is that Mr. Darwin, though maintaining silence in
respect to it, retreated from his original position in the direction that
would most obviate Mr. Spencer's objection.

Yet this objection has been repeatedly urged by the more prominent anti-
Charles-Darwinian authorities, and there is no sign that the British
public is becoming less rigorous in requiring people either to reply to
objections repeatedly urged by men of even moderate weight, or to let
judgment go by default. As regards Mr. Darwin's claim to the theory of
evolution generally, Darwinians are beginning now to perceive that this
cannot be admitted, and either say with some hardihood that Mr. Darwin
never claimed it, or after a few saving clauses to the effect that this
theory refers only to the particular means by which evolution has been
brought about, imply forthwith thereafter none the less that evolution is
Mr. Darwin's theory. Mr. Wallace has done this repeatedly in his recent
"Darwinism." Indeed, I should be by no means sure that on the first page
of his preface, in the passage about "Darwin's theory," which I have
already somewhat severely criticised, he was not intending evolution by
"Darwin's theory," if in his preceding paragraph he had not so clearly
shown that he knew evolution to be a theory of greatly older date than
Mr. Darwin's.

The history of science--well exemplified by that of the development
theory--is the history of eminent men who have fought against light and
have been worsted. The tenacity with which Darwinians stick to their
ac