hould have
afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct with
malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences. Yet such was
the portion of one of the kindest and truest men that it was ever
my good fortune to know; and years had to pass away before
misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation ceased to be the
most notable constituents of the majority of the multitudinous
criticisms of his work which poured from the press. I am loth to
rake up any of these ancient scandals from their well-deserved
oblivion; but I must make good a statement which may seem
overcharged to the present generation, and there is no _piece
justificative_ more apt for the purpose or more worthy of such
dishonour than the article in the _Quarterly Review_ for July,
1860. Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen
no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a
Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of
the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most
candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to
scorn as a 'flighty' person who endeavours to 'prop up his
utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode
of dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable
to natural science.' And all this high and mighty talk, which
would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds
from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of
both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's
views, he can ask, 'Is it credible that all favourable varieties
of turnips are tending to become men'; who is so ignorant of
palaeontology that he can talk of the 'flowers and fruits' of the
plants of the carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that
he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of venomous snakes to
be 'entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and
peculiar to themselves'; of the rudiments of physiology, that he
can ask, 'what advantage of life could alter the shape of the
corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?' Nor does the
reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of incapacity with a
little stimulation of the _odium theologicum_. Some inkling of
the history of the conflicts between astronomy, geology,