contrary, I have given the greater part of my time to their
consideration for several years past. I should not, however, say
this unless led to do so by regard to the interests of theories
which I believe to be as nearly important as any theories can be
which do not directly involve money or bodily convenience.

The second complaint against me is to the effect that I have made no
original experiments, but have taken all my facts at second hand.
This is true, but I do not see what it has to do with the question.
If the facts are sound, how can it matter whether A or B collected
them? If Professor Huxley, for example, has made a series of
valuable original observations (not that I know of his having done
so), why am I to make them over again? What are fact-collectors
worth if the fact co-ordinators may not rely upon them? It seems to
me that no one need do more than go to the best sources for his
facts, and tell his readers where he got them. If I had had
occasion for more facts I daresay I should have taken the necessary
steps to get hold of them, but there was no difficulty on this
score; every text-book supplied me with all, and more than all, I
wanted; my complaint was that the facts which Mr. Darwin supplied
would not bear the construction he tried to put upon them; I tried,
therefore, to make them bear another which seemed at once more sound
and more commodious; rightly or wrongly I set up as a builder, not
as a burner of bricks, and the complaint so often brought against me
of not having made experiments is about as reasonable as complaint
against an architect on the score of his not having quarried with
his own hands a single one of the stones which he has used in
building. Let my opponents show that the facts which they and I use
in common are unsound, or that I have misapplied them, and I will
gladly learn my mistake, but this has hardly, to my knowledge, been