His writing of "EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW" (1879) was due to his
conviction that scant justice had been done by Charles Darwin and
Alfred Wallace and their admirers to the pioneering work of Buffon,
Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck. To repair this he gives a brilliant
exposition of what seemed to him the most valuable portion of their
teachings on evolution. His analysis of Buffon's true meaning,
veiled by the reticences due to the conditions under which he wrote,
is as masterly as the English in which he develops it. His sense of
wounded justice explains the vigorous polemic which here, as in all
his later writings, he carries to the extreme.

As a matter of fact, he never realised Charles Darwin's utter lack of
sympathetic understanding of the work of his French precursors, let
alone his own grandfather, Erasmus. Yet this practical ignorance,
which to Butler was so strange as to transcend belief, was altogether
genuine, and easy to realise when we recall the position of Natural
Science in the early thirties in Darwin's student days at Cambridge,
and for a decade or two later. Catastropharianism was the tenet of
the day: to the last it commended itself to his Professors of Botany
and Geology,--for whom Darwin held the fervent allegiance of the
Indian scholar, or chela, to his guru. As Geikie has recently
pointed out, it was only later, when Lyell had shown that the breaks
in the succession of the rocks were only partial and local, without
involving the universal catastrophes that destroyed all life and
rendered fresh creations thereof necessary, that any general
acceptance of a descent theory could be expected. We may be very
sure that Darwin must have received many solemn warnings against the
dangerous speculations of the "French Revolutionary School." He
himself was far too busy at the time with the reception and
assimilation of new facts to be awake to the deeper interest of far-