against some people, but it is only a very sensible person who does not lose it.  Moreover, once begin to go behind achievement and there is an end of everything.  Did the world give much heed to or believe in evolution before Mr. Darwin’s time?  Certainly not.  Did we begin to attend and be persuaded soon after Mr. Darwin began to write?  Certainly yes.  Did we ere long go over en masse?  Assuredly.  If, as I said in “Life and Habit,” any one asks who taught the world to believe in evolution, the answer to the end of time must be that it was Mr. Darwin.  And yet the more his work is looked at, the more marvellous does its success become.  It seems as if some organisms can do anything with anything.  Beethoven picked his teeth with the snuffers, and seems to have picked them sufficiently to his satisfaction.  So Mr. Darwin with one of the worst styles imaginable did all that the clearest, tersest writer could have done.  Strange, that such a master of cunning (in the sense of my title) should have been the apostle of luck, and one so terribly unlucky as Lamarck, of cunning, but such is the irony of nature.  Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said, “That fruit is ripe,” and shook it into his lap.

With this Mr. Darwin’s best friends ought to be content; his admirers are not well advised in representing him as endowed with all sorts of qualities which he was very far from possessing.  Thus it is pretended that he was one of those men who were ever on the watch for new ideas, ever ready to give a helping hand to those who were trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands.  No conception can be more wantonly inexact.  I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was “ever ready,” &c.  So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people’s feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are in the habit of washing poor people’s feet.  I can understand Mr. Darwin’s not having taken any public notice, for example, of “Life and Habit,” for though I did not attack him in force in that book, it was abundantly clear that an attack could not be long delayed, and a man may be pardoned for not doing anything to advertise the works of his opponents; but there is no excuse for his never having referred to Professor Hering’s work either in “Nature,” when Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to it (July 13, 1876), or in some one of his subsequent books.  If his attitude towards those who worked in the same field as himself had been the generous one which his admirers pretend, he would have certainly come forward, not necessarily as adopting Professor Hering’s theory, but still as helping it to obtain a hearing.