ust as having an
ulterior aim on which he is more intent than on the furthering of
our better understanding. We want to know who is doing his best to
help us, and who is only trying to make us help him, or to bolster
up the system in which his interests are vested. There is nothing
that will throw more light upon these points than the way in which a
man behaves towards those who have worked in the same field with
himself, and, again, than his style. A man's style, as Buffon long
since said, is the man himself. By style, I do not, of course, mean
grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again said that
it is like happiness, and vient de la douceur de l'ame. When we
find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences
that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we
should a fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to steal our watch.
We often cannot judge of the truth or falsehood of facts for
ourselves, but we most of us know enough of human nature to be able
to tell a good witness from a bad one.

However this may be, and whatever we may think of judging systems by
the directness or indirectness of those who advance them,
biologists, having committed themselves too rashly, would have been
more than human if they had not shown some pique towards those who
dared to say, first, that the theory of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace
was unworkable; and secondly, that even though it were workable it
would not justify either of them in claiming evolution. When
biologists show pique at all they generally show a good deal of
pique, but pique or no pique, they shunned Mr. Spencer's objection
above referred to with a persistency more unanimous and obstinate
than I ever remember to have seen displayed even by professional
truth-seekers. I find no rejoinder to it from Mr. Darwin himself,
between 1865 when it was first put forward, and 1882 when Mr. Darwin
died. It has been similarly "ostrichized" by all the leading
apologists of Darwinism, so far at least as I have been able to
observe, and I have followed the matter closely for many years. Mr.
Spencer has repeated and amplified it in his recent work The Factors
of Organic Evolution, but it still remains without so much as an
attempt at serious answer, for the perfunctory and illusory remarks
of Mr. Wallace at the end of his Darwinism cannot be counted as
such. The best proof of its irresistible weight is that Mr. Darwin,
though maintaining