I have not sufficient technical knowledge to enable me to speak certainly, but I question his having been the great observer and master of experiment which he is generally believed to have been.  His accuracy was, I imagine, generally to be relied upon as long as accuracy did not come into conflict with his interests as a leader in the scientific world; when these were at stake he was not to be trusted for a moment.  Unfortunately they were directly or indirectly at stake more often than one could wish.  His book on the action of worms, however, was shown by Professor Paley and other writers {242a} to contain many serious errors and omissions, though it involved no personal question; but I imagine him to have been more or less hebete when he wrote this book.  On the whole I should doubt his having been a better observer of nature than nine country gentlemen out of ten who have a taste for natural history.

Presumptuous as I am aware it must appear to say so, I am unable to see more than average intellectual power even in Mr. Darwin’s later books.  His great contribution to science is supposed to have been the theory of natural selection, but enough has been said to show that this, if understood as he ought to have meant it to be understood, cannot be rated highly as an intellectual achievement.  His other most important contribution was his provisional theory of pan-genesis, which is admitted on all hands to have been a failure.  Though, however, it is not likely that posterity will consider him as a man of transcendent intellectual power, he must be admitted to have been richly endowed with a much more valuable quality than either originality or literary power—­I mean with savoir faire.  The cards he held—­and, on the whole, his hand was a good one—­he played with judgment; and though not one of those who would have achieved greatness under any circumstances, he nevertheless did achieve greatness of no mean order.  Greatness, indeed, of the highest kind--that of one who is without fear and without reproach—­will not ultimately be allowed him, but greatness of a rare kind can only be denied him by those whose judgment is perverted by temper or personal ill-will.  He found the world believing in fixity of species, and left it believing—­in spite of his own doctrine—­in descent with modification.

I have said on an earlier page that Mr. Darwin was heir to a discredited truth, and left behind him an accredited fallacy.  This is true as regards men of science and cultured classes who understood his distinctive feature, or thought they did, and so long as Mr. Darwin lived accepted it with very rare exceptions; but it is not true as regards the unreading, unreflecting public, who seized the salient point of descent with modification only, and troubled themselves little about the distinctive feature.  It would almost seem as if Mr. Darwin had reversed the usual practice of philosophers and given his esoteric doctrine to the world, while reserving the exoteric for his