in Mr. Darwin's book; and being grateful for it, we were very ready
to take Mr. Darwin's work at the estimate tacitly claimed for it by
himself, and vehemently insisted upon by reviewers in influential
journals, who took much the same line towards the earlier writers on
evolution as Mr. Darwin himself had taken. But perhaps nothing more
prepossessed us in Mr. Darwin's favour than the air of candour that
was omnipresent throughout his work. The prominence given to the
arguments of opponents completely carried us away; it was this which
threw us off our guard. It never occurred to us that there might be
other and more dangerous opponents who were not brought forward. Mr.
Darwin did not tell us what his grandfather and Lamarck would have
had to say to this or that. Moreover, there was an unobtrusive
parade of hidden learning and of difficulties at last overcome which
was particularly grateful to us. Whatever opinion might be
ultimately come to concerning the value of his theory, there could be
but one about the value of the example he had set to men of science
generally by the perfect frankness and unselfishness of his work.
Friends and foes alike combined to do homage to Mr. Darwin in this
respect.

For, brilliant as the reception of the "Origin of Species" was, it
met in the first instance with hardly less hostile than friendly
criticism. But the attacks were ill-directed; they came from a
suspected quarter, and those who led them did not detect more than
the general public had done what were the really weak places in Mr.
Darwin's armour. They attacked him where he was strongest; and above
all, they were, as a general rule, stamped with a disingenuousness
which at that time we believed to be peculiar to theological writers
and alien to the spirit of science. Seeing, therefore, that the men
of science ranged themselves more and more decidedly on Mr. Darwin's