scientific opponents; I should find their books much more easy and
agreeable reading if I could; and then they tell me to satirise the
follies and abuses of the age, just as if it was not this that I was
doing in writing about themselves.

What, I wonder, would they say if I were to declare that they ought
not to write books at all, on the ground that their past career has
been too purely scientific to entitle them to a hearing? They would
reply with justice that I should not bring vague general
condemnations, but should quote examples of their bad writing. I
imagine that I have done this more than once as regards a good many
of them, and I dare say I may do it again in the course of this
book; but though I must own to thinking that the greater number of
our scientific men write abominably, I should not bring this against
them if I believed them to be doing their best to help us; many such
men we happily have, and doubtless always shall have, but they are
not those who push to the fore, and it is these last who are most
angry with me for writing on the subjects I have chosen. They
constantly tell me that I am not a man of science; no one knows this
better than I do, and I am quite used to being told it, but I am not
used to being confronted with the mistakes that I have made in
matters of fact, and trust that this experience is one which I may
continue to spare no pains in trying to avoid.

Nevertheless I again freely grant that I am not a man of science. I
have never said I was. I was educated for the Church. I was once
inside the Linnean Society's rooms, but have no present wish to go
there again; though not a man of science, however, I have never
affected indifference to the facts and arguments which men of
science have made it their business to lay before us; on the