Abstract
THE decade which followed the appearance of the “Origin of Species” witnessed the publication of innumerable books and articles dealing with Darwin's great work. Although many of these were solid and valuable contributions to the literature of evolution and natural selection, the mass as a whole was characterised by the large proportion of works which proclaimed with the utmost confidence the opinions of authors unknown as naturalists. Men whose claim to a hearing was of the slenderest kind spoke with contempt of Darwin's reasoning powers or the rashness of his generalisations. After 1870 such works became rarer, and at the present day are, happily, quite uncommon. The book before us is, however, about as bad an example as can be found. It would not have been astonishing in 1869 to be told by a writer unknown as an original observer or thinker that “Mr. Darwin's capacities of thinking and drawing inferences from the immense masses of fact he had collected were not at all equal to his powers of observation, investigation and classification,” or to observe the calm satisfaction in the following sentence: “My little effort will show that, wherever I have paid special attention to any department of natural history or natural science, I am apt to find Mr. Darwin at fault, more especially in his generalisations.” The mildest statement which can be made about the publication thirty years later of such opinions by a Mr. P. Y. Alexander—author of “Heredity,” “Parasitism,” &c., notwithstanding—is that the work is an anachronism.
Darwin and Darwinism, Pure and Mixed.
By Dr. P. Y. Alexander. Pp. xii + 346. (London: Bale, 1899.)
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P., E. Darwin and Darwinism, Pure and Mixed . Nature 63, 5 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/063005a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/063005a0