Then entered John Burroughs to clinch President Roosevelt’s judgments.  In this alliance there is no difference of opinion.  That Roosevelt can do no wrong is Burroughs’s opinion; and that Burroughs is always right is Roosevelt’s opinion.  Both are agreed that animals do not reason.  They assert that all animals below man are automatons and perform actions only of two sorts—­mechanical and reflex—­and that in such actions no reasoning enters at all.  They believe that man is the only animal capable of reasoning and that ever does reason.  This is a view that makes the twentieth-century scientist smile.  It is not modern at all.  It is distinctly mediaeval.  President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in advancing such a view, are homocentric in the same fashion that the scholastics of earlier and darker centuries were homocentric.  Had the world not been discovered to be round until after the births of President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, they would have been geocentric as well in their theories of the Cosmos.  They could not have believed otherwise.  The stuff of their minds is so conditioned.  They talk the argot of evolution, while they no more understand the essence and the import of evolution than does a South Sea Islander or Sir Oliver Lodge understand the noumena of radio-activity.

Now, President Roosevelt is an amateur.  He may know something of statecraft and of big-game shooting; he may be able to kill a deer when he sees it and to measure it and weigh it after he has shot it; he may be able to observe carefully and accurately the actions and antics of tomtits and snipe, and, after he has observed it, definitely and coherently to convey the information of when the first chipmunk, in a certain year and a certain latitude and longitude, came out in the spring and chattered and gambolled—­but that he should be able, as an individual observer, to analyze all animal life and to synthetize and develop all that is known of the method and significance of evolution, would require a vaster credulity for you or me to believe than is required for us to believe the biggest whopper ever told by an unmitigated nature-faker.  No, President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does not seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.

Remains John Burroughs, who claims to be a thorough-going evolutionist.  Now, it is rather hard for a young man to tackle an old man.  It is the nature of young men to be more controlled in such matters, and it is the nature of old men, presuming upon the wisdom that is very often erroneously associated with age, to do the tackling.  In this present question of nature-faking, the old men did the tackling, while I, as one young man, kept quiet a long time.  But here goes at last.  And first of all let Mr. Burroughs’s position be stated, and stated in his words.