[January 16.

At lunch he spoke of Dr. Louis Robinson’s experiments upon simian characteristics in new-born children.  He himself had called attention before to the incurved feet of infants, but the power of hanging by the hands was a new and important discovery. (Professor H.F.  Osborn tells this story of his:—­“When a fond mother calls upon me to admire her baby, I never fail to respond; and while cooing appropriately, I take advantage of an opportunity to gently ascertain whether the soles of its feet turn in, and tend to support my theory of arboreal descent.”)

He expressed his disgust with a certain member of the Psychical Research Society for his attitude towards spiritualism]:  “He doesn’t believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name.  He is one of the people who talk of the ‘possibility’ of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its favour.”

[He thought it hard to be attacked for] “the contempt of the man of science” [when he was dragged into debate by Mr. Andrew Lang’s “Cock Lane and Common Sense”, he saying in a very polite letter}:  “I am content to leave Mr. Lang the Cock Lane Ghost if I may keep common sense.”  “After all,” [he added], “when a man has been through life and made his judgments, he must have come to a decision that there are some subjects it is not worth while going into.”

January 18.

I referred to an article in the last “Nineteenth Century”, and he said]:—­“As soon as I saw it, I wrote, ’Knowles, my friend, you don’t draw me this time.  If a man goes on attributing statements to me which I have shown over and over again—­giving chapter and verse—­to be the contrary of what I did say, it is no good saying any more.’”

[But would not this course of silence leave the mass of the British public believing the statements of the writer?]

“The mass of the public will believe in ten years precisely the opposite of what they believe now.  If a man is not a fool, it does him no harm to be believed one.  If he really is a fool, it does matter.  There never was book so derided and scoffed at as my first book, “Man’s Place in Nature”, but it was true, and I don’t know I was any the worse for the ridicule.

“People call me fond of controversy, but, as a fact, for the last twenty years at all events, I have never entered upon a controversy without some further purpose in view.  As to Gladstone and his “Impregnable Rock”, it wasn’t worth attacking them for themselves; but it was most important at that moment to shake him in the minds of sensible men.