Note 218 — Chapter XIII · THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES'—REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS—ADHESIONS AND ATTACKS.

Quarterly Review, July 1860. The article in question was by Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and was afterwards published in his Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review, 1874. In the Life and Letters, ii. p. 182, Mr. Huxley has given some account of this article. I quote a few lines:—"Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a 'flighty' person, who endeavours 'to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode of dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.'" The passage from the Anti-Jacobin, referred to in the letter, gives the history of the evolution of space from the "primæval point or punctum saliens of the universe," which is conceived to have moved "forward in a right line, ad infinitum, till it grew tired; after which the right line, which it had generated, would begin to put itself in motion in a lateral direction, describing an area of infinite extent. This area, as soon as it became conscious of its own existence, would begin to ascend or descend according as its specific gravity would determine it, forming an immense solid space filled with vacuum, and capable of containing the present universe."

The following (p. 263) may serve as an example of the passages in which the reviewer refers to Sir Charles Lyell:—"That Mr. Darwin should have wandered from this broad highway of nature's works into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. We trust that he is mistaken in believing that he may count Sir C. Lyell as one of his converts. We know, indeed, the strength of the temptations which he can bring to bear upon his geological brother.... Yet no man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir C. Lyell, and that not in the infancy of his scientific life, but in its full vigour and maturity." The Bishop goes on to appeal to Lyell, in order that with his help "this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what in spite of all denials we must venture to call its twin though less instructed brother, the Vestiges of Creation."

With reference to this article, Mr. Brodie Innes, my father's old friend and neighbour, writes:—"Most men would have been annoyed by an article written with the Bishop's accustomed vigour, a mixture of argument and ridicule. Mr. Darwin was writing on some parish matter, and put a postscript—'If you have not seen the last Quarterly, do get it; the Bishop of Oxford has made such capital fun of me and my grandfather.' By a curious coincidence, when I received the letter, I was staying in the same house with the Bishop, and showed it to him. He said, 'I am very glad he takes it in that way, he is such a capital fellow.'"