Abstract
IT is difficult to understand why the author of this pamphlet should think it worth while to remind his readers periodically that he is an opponent of Darwinism. Some space was recently devoted in these columns to the consideration of a book on the same subject by Mr. Pascoe, and the present production is nothing more than an abstract of this work, delivered in the form of an address to the Western Microscopical Club. We have no new facts nor arguments; there is the same lamentable display of misconception, and the author has simply strung together some sixteen pages of excerpts from the writings of Darwin and others, without any attempt at connected reasoning either for or against the Darwinian theory. The author's position is practically this: here is the whole animal kingdom, consisting of about 600,000 species; you must explain every detail of specific structure, down to the most insignificant, by the theory of natural selection; if you cannot do this, the theory is untenable. The whole of Mr. Pascoe's writings in connection with Darwinism amount to this, and nothing more; he has reiterated this statement, if not literally, at any rate in spirit, on every available opportunity for the last twenty years. The present pamphlet will, let us hope, for the sake of the author's reputation, be the last declaration to the same effect, for there is surely nothing gained either by Darwinism or anti-Darwinism by squandering the systematic powers which he is known to possess in picking out scraps of sentences from the “Origin of Species,” &c., and publishing these things “of shreds and patches” under grandiloquent and misleading titles.
A Summary of the Darwinian Theory of the Origin of Species.
By Francis P. Pascoe, &c. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1891.)
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M., R. A Summary of the Darwinian Theory of the Origin of Species. Nature 44, 247 (1891). https://doi.org/10.1038/044247b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/044247b0