Note 16 — Chapter V · IRRECONCILABLE DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH EVOLUTION

There is another of these attempts to relieve doubt which I should like to bring to notice. The little book entitled In Relief of Doubt, by the Rev. E. Welsh, highly recommended by the Bishop of London, and one of the books selected by the Christian Evidence Society for their examination in March, 1907, is quoted from by Dr. Warschauer16 when refuting Mr. Blatchford’s remarks on the cruelty of Nature. Dr. Warschauer selects the passage where Mr. Welsh says (p. 103): “We probably overstate the actual anguish of the lower creatures, imagining that they are bundles of sensitive nerves and quick brains like our own, and that they therefore have our sensibility to pain. A trodden worm writhes, and we credit it with all the pain that the foot of a Brobdingnag would inflict on a delicate child under his heel.” Now, I am quite sure we credit no such thing. If we did, we, and especially the Isaak Waltons among us, would be perfect monsters of cruelty. Mark, too, how Messrs. Welsh and Warschauer carefully select for their illustration a worm—one of the lowly organised invertebrates! I may mention that Dr. Warschauer’s book was particularly recommended to me by a well-read cleric, who thought that it was an admirable and complete refutation of Mr. Blatchford’s arguments. Dr. Warschauer will hardly advance his cause by transparently omitting all mention of the higher animals, or of that bundle of nerves called man.