With this Mr. Darwin’s best friends ought to be content; his admirers are not well advised in representing him as endowed with all sorts of qualities which he was very far from possessing. Thus it is pretended that he was one of those men who were ever on the watch for new ideas, ever ready to give a helping hand to those who were trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands. No conception can be more wantonly inexact. I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was “ever ready,” &c. So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people’s feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly ceremony, and conclude that the Emperors of Austria are in the habit of washing poor people’s feet. I can understand Mr. Darwin’s not having taken any public notice, for example, of “Life and Habit,” for though I did not attack him in force in that book, it was abundantly clear that an attack could not be long delayed, and a man may be pardoned for not doing anything to advertise the works of his opponents; but there is no excuse for his never having referred to Professor Hering’s work either in “Nature,” when Professor Ray Lankester first called attention to it (July 13, 1876), or in some one of his subsequent books. If his attitude towards those who worked in the same field as himself had been the generous one which his admirers pretend, he would have certainly come forward, not necessarily as adopting Professor Hering’s theory, but still as helping it to obtain a hearing.