I might as well write that Darwin “may have thought it well” to discuss (and attempt to destroy) Design. Why, the whole of this work is one long and victorious attack upon the idea which Mr. Wells took for granted! It is not a casual refutation of some nonsense about the embryo exactly reproducing every minute stage of its ancestral past; it is a fundamental, detailed, complete refutation of the idea which Mr. Wells repeats. Out of any number of citations which might be taken from Vialleton’s hundreds of pages I then gave, and here give again, one: and it is sufficient. “Ontogenesis” (that is the development of the Embryo) “always begins with a general form and _not_” (my italics) “with a form recalling another simpler form passed through in an earlier phase of development.” So much for that. It is but one out of many examples of our Author’s being behind the times. Here is another. In describing the glacial epochs, he trots out with the most naïf confidence (on pp. 20–22) the hopelessly dead astronomical theory which did duty in the textbooks of his youth and mine—for I also have believed these things. Relying on a popular volume which, at the time, had great effect, he puts down the main cause of glaciation to the combination of varying eccentricity in the earth’s orbit with varying inclination of the axis, of which he gives a large diagram. Under the effect of the two movements (which Leverrier calculated more than a lifetime ago) the Northern and Southern Hemispheres would alternately suffer from cold and enjoy greater warmth. When the Northern Hemisphere was getting colder and colder, the Southern would be getting warmer and warmer, and vice versa. This was called “Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation,” and was made popular by a book of Sir Robert Ball’s in 1893. [1893, as I have said, seems, from internal evidence, to be about the date when Mr. Wells’s stock of information crystallized.] Now Croll’s astronomical theory broke down quite early under criticism. It was dead before the end of the nineteenth century. The eleventh edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is not exactly recent. Its well-worn covers testify to its age in all our libraries, and I see that a thirteenth edition is due. But even the eleventh edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ could have informed Mr. Wells that Croll’s theory had broken down. Would he like something quite recent? Professor Coleman—Emeritus Professor of Geology at Toronto—has just issued a study of glacial periods, and I find on page 274 the curt sentence, “Croll’s theory at present receives little attention.” And why? Because fact, that dreadful enemy to theorizing, has killed it. If it were true, glaciation would have been alternate in north and south. As a fact, it has been proved simultaneous—the South American clay deposits alone show that.