It is amazing how very widely diffused is the ignorance of such really important matters as this Hapley-Pawkins feud.  Those epoch-making controversies, again, that have convulsed the Geological Society, are, I verily believe, almost entirely unknown outside the fellowship of that body.  I have heard men of fair general education even refer to the great scenes at these meetings as vestry-meeting squabbles.  Yet the great Hate of the English and Scotch geologists has lasted now half a century, and has “left deep and abundant marks upon the body of the science.”  And this Hapley-Pawkins business, though perhaps a more personal affair, stirred passions as profound, if not profounder.  Your common man has no conception of the zeal that animates a scientific investigator, the fury of contradiction you can arouse in him.  It is the odium theologicum in a new form.  There are men, for instance, who would gladly burn Professor Ray Lankester at Smithfield for his treatment of the Mollusca in the Encyclopaedia.  That fantastic extension of the Cephalopods to cover the Pteropods ...  But I wander from Hapley and Pawkins.

It began years and years ago, with a revision of the Microlepidoptera (whatever these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new species created by Hapley.  Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied by a stinging impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins[A].  Pawkins, in his “Rejoinder[B],” suggested that Hapley’s microscope was as defective as his powers of observation, and called him an “irresponsible meddler”—­Hapley was not a professor at that time.  Hapley, in his retort[C], spoke of “blundering collectors,” and described, as if inadvertently, Pawkins’ revision as a “miracle of ineptitude.”  It was war to the knife.  However, it would scarcely interest the reader to detail how these two great men quarrelled, and how the split between them widened until from the Microlepidoptera they were at war upon every open question in entomology.  There were memorable occasions.  At times the Royal Entomological Society meetings resembled nothing so much as the Chamber of Deputies.  On the whole, I fancy Pawkins was nearer the truth than Hapley.  But Hapley was skilful with his rhetoric, had a turn for ridicule rare in a scientific man, was endowed with vast energy, and had a fine sense of injury in the matter of the extinguished species; while Pawkins was a man of dull presence, prosy of speech, in shape not unlike a water-barrel, over-conscientious with testimonials, and suspected of jobbing museum appointments.  So the young men gathered round Hapley and applauded him.  It was a long struggle, vicious from the beginning, and growing at last to pitiless antagonism.  The successive turns of fortune, now an advantage to one side and now to another—­now Hapley tormented by some success of Pawkins, and now Pawkins outshone by Hapley, belong rather to the history of entomology than to this story.

[Footnote A:  “Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera.” Quart, Journ.  Entomological Soc. 1863.]