I should have thought it would have been enough if it had collapsed without the “absolutely,” but Professor Ray Lankester does not like doing things by halves.  Few will be taken in by the foregoing quotation, except those who do not greatly care whether they are taken in or not; but to save trouble to readers who may have neither Lamarck nor Professor Semper at hand, I will put the case as follows:-

Professor Semper writes a book to show, we will say, that the hour-hand of the clock moves gradually forward, in spite of its appearing stationary.  He makes his case sufficiently clear, and then might have been content to leave it; nevertheless, in the innocence of his heart, he adds the admission that though he had often looked at the clock for a long time together, he had never been able actually to see the hour-hand moving.  “There now,” exclaims Professor Ray Lankester on this, “I told you so; the theory collapses absolutely; his whole object and desire is to show that the hour-hand moves, and yet when it comes to the point, he is obliged to confess that he cannot see it do so.”  It is not worth while to meet what Professor Ray Lankester has been above quoted as saying about Lamarckism beyond quoting the following passage from a review of “The Neanderthal Skull on Evolution” in the “Monthly Journal of Science” for June, 1885 (p. 362):-

“On the very next page the author reproduces the threadbare objection that the ’supporters of the theory have never yet succeeded in observing a single instance in all the millions of years invented (!) in its support of one species of animal turning into another.’  Now, ex hypothesi, one species turns into another not rapidly, as in a transformation scene, but in successive generations, each being born a shade different from its progenitors.  Hence to observe such a change is excluded by the very terms of the question.  Does Mr. Saville forget Mr. Herbert Spencer’s apologue of the ephemeron which had never witnessed the change of a child into a man?”

The apologue, I may say in passing, is not Mr. Spencer’s; it is by the author of the “Vestiges,” and will be found on page 161 of the 1853 edition of that book; but let this pass.  How impatient Professor Ray Lankester is of any attempt to call attention to the older view of evolution appears perhaps even more plainly in a review of this same book of Professor Semper’s that appeared in “Nature,” March 3, 1881.  The tenor of the remarks last quoted shows that though what I am about to quote is now more than five years old, it may be taken as still giving us the position which Professor Ray Lankester takes on these matters.  He wrote:-

“It is necessary,” he exclaims, “to plainly and emphatically state” (Why so much emphasis?  Why not “it should be stated"?) “that Professor Semper and a few other writers of similar views” {227a} (I have sent for the number of “Modern Thought” referred to by Professor Ray Lankester but find no article by Mr. Henslow, and do not, therefore, know what he had said) “are not adding to or building on Mr. Darwin’s theory, but are actually opposing all that is essential and distinctive in that theory, by the revival of the exploded notion of ‘directly transforming agents’ advocated by Lamarck and others.”