Canterbury Pieces | Page 6

Darwin, and adopting a contemptuous tone with regard to the claims of
Erasmus Darwin to have sown the seed which was afterwards raised to
maturity by his grandson. It would be interesting to know if it was this
correspondence that first turned Butler's attention seriously to the
works of the older evolutionists and ultimately led to the production of
EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW, in which the indebtedness of Charles
Darwin to Erasmus Darwin, Buffon and Lamarck is demonstrated with
such compelling force.

DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: A Dialogue [From the
Press, 20 December, 1862.]

F. So you have finished Darwin? Well, how did you like him?
C. You cannot expect me to like him. He is so hard and logical, and he
treats his subject with such an intensity of dry reasoning without giving
himself the loose rein for a single moment from one end of the book to
the other, that I must confess I have found it a great effort to read him
through.
F. But I fancy that, if you are to be candid, you will admit that the fault
lies rather with yourself than with the book. Your knowledge of natural
history is so superficial that you are constantly baffled by terms of
which you do not understand the meaning, and in which you
consequently lose all interest. I admit, however, that the book is hard
and laborious reading; and, moreover, that the writer appears to have
predetermined from the commencement to reject all ornament, and
simply to argue from beginning to end, from point to point, till he
conceived that he had made his case sufficiently clear.
C. I agree with you, and I do not like his book partly on that very
account. He seems to have no eye but for the single point at which he is
aiming.
F. But is not that a great virtue in a writer?
C. A great virtue, but a cold and hard one.

F. In my opinion it is a grave and wise one. Moreover, I conceive that
the judicial calmness which so strongly characterises the whole book,
the absence of all passion, the air of extreme and anxious caution which
pervades it throughout, are rather the result of training and artificially
acquired self-restraint than symptoms of a cold and unimpassioned
nature; at any rate, whether the lawyer-like faculty of swearing both
sides of a question and attaching the full value to both is acquired or
natural in Darwin's case, you will admit that such a habit of mind is
essential for any really valuable and scientific investigation.
C. I admit it. Science is all head--she has no heart at all.
F. You are right. But a man of science may be a man of other things
besides science, and though he may have, and ought to have no heart
during a scientific investigation, yet when he has once come to a
conclusion he may be hearty enough in support of it, and in his other
capacities may be of as warm a temperament as even you can desire.
C. I tell you I do not like the book.
F. May I catechise you a little upon it?
C. To your heart's content.
F. Firstly, then, I will ask you what is the one great impression that you
have derived from reading it; or, rather, what do you think to be the
main impression that Darwin wanted you to derive?
C. Why, I should say some such thing as the following--that men are
descended from monkeys, and monkeys from something else, and so on
back to dogs and horses and hedge-sparrows and pigeons and cinipedes
(what is a cinipede?) and cheesemites, and then through the plants
down to duckweed.
F. You express the prevalent idea concerning the book, which as you
express it appears nonsensical enough.
C. How, then, should you express it yourself?
F. Hand me the book and I will read it to you through from beginning
to end, for to express it more briefly than Darwin himself has done is
almost impossible.
C. That is nonsense; as you asked me what impression I derived from
the book, so now I ask you, and I charge you to answer me.
F. Well, I assent to the justice of your demand, but I shall comply with
it by requiring your assent to a few principal statements deducible from
the work.

C. So be it.
F. You will grant then, firstly, that all plants and animals increase very
rapidly, and that unless they were in some manner checked, the world
would soon be overstocked. Take cats, for instance; see with what
rapidity they breed on the different runs in this province where there is
little or nothing to check them; or even take the more