We were aware, on reading the “Origin of Species,” that there was a something about it of which we had not full hold; nevertheless we gave Mr. Darwin our confidence at once, partly because he led off by telling us that we must trust him to a great extent, and explained that the present book was only an instalment of a larger work which, when it came out, would make everything perfectly clear; partly, again, because the case for descent with modification, which was the leading idea throughout the book, was so obviously strong, but perhaps mainly because every one said Mr. Darwin was so good, and so much less self-heeding than other people; besides, he had so “patiently” and “carefully” accumulated “such a vast store of facts” as no other naturalist, living or dead, had ever yet even tried to get together; he was so kind to us with his, “May we not believe?” and his “Have we any right to infer that the Creator?” &c. “Of course we have not,” we exclaimed, almost with tears in our eyes—“not if you ask us in that way.” Now that we understand what it was that puzzled us in Mr. Darwin’s work we do not think highly either of the chief offender, or of the accessories after the fact, many of whom are trying to brazen the matter out, and on a smaller scale to follow his example. Chapter XVIII Per Contra “‘THE evil that men do lives after them” {239a} is happily not so true as that the good lives after them, while the ill is buried with their bones, and to no one does this correction of Shakespeare’s unwonted spleen apply more fully than to Mr. Darwin. Indeed it was somewhat thus that we treated his books even while he was alive; the good, descent, remained with us, while the ill, the deification of luck, was forgotten as soon as we put down his work. Let me now, therefore, as far as possible, quit the ungrateful task of dwelling on the defects of Mr. Darwin’s work and character, for the more pleasant one of insisting upon their better side, and of explaining how he came to be betrayed into publishing the “Origin of Species” without reference to the works of his predecessors. In the outset I would urge that it is not by any single book that Mr. Darwin should be judged. I do not believe that any one of the three principal works on which his reputation is founded will maintain with the next generation the place it has acquired with ourselves; nevertheless, if asked to say who was the man of our own times whose work had produced the most important, and, on the whole, beneficial effect, I should perhaps wrongly, but still both instinctively and on reflection, name him to whom I have, unfortunately, found myself in more bitter opposition than to any other in the whole course of my life. I refer, of course, to Mr. Darwin.