be contended that the investigations of scientific men, whether committed
to writing or to speech, are always suited to the taste and capacities of
our general public. There was, for example, the well-known doctrine of
Evolution, the teachings of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russet Wallace, who
gathered up certain facts, hitherto but vaguely known, into presentments,
irreverent and startling, which, at the time, profoundly disturbed every
normal mind. Not only did religion, as then accepted, suffer in this
cataclysm, but our taste and feeling were inexpressibly shocked by the
discovery, so emphasised by Thomas Henry Huxley, of Man's descent from
Apes. It was felt, and is felt by many to this day, that the advancement
of that theory grossly and dangerously violated every canon of decency.
What pain, then, might have been averted, what far-reaching consequences
and incalculable subversion of primitive faiths checked, if some
judicious Censor of scientific thought had existed in those days to
demand, in accordance with his private estimate of the will and temper of
the majority, the suppression of the doctrine of Evolution.

Innumerable investigations of scientists on subjects such as the date of
the world's creation, have from time to time been summarised and
inconsiderately sprung on a Public shocked and startled by the revelation
that facts which they were accustomed to revere were conspicuously at
fault. So, too, in the range of medicine, it would be difficult to cite
any radical discovery (such as the preventive power of vaccination),
whose unchecked publication has not violated the prejudices and disturbed
the immediate comfort of the common mind. Had these discoveries been
judiciously suppressed, or pared away to suit what a Censorship conceived
to be the popular palate of the time, all this disturbance and discomfort
might have been avoided.

It will doubtless be contended (for there are no such violent opponents