Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/716

698 of scientific inquiry, it is as grave an offence as the letting one's note go to protest is in matters of business. In saying these things, I do not mean to charge Prof. Agassiz with intellectual cowardice and insincerity, for the remark which I criticise so sharply was not worthy of him, it did not comport with his real character as a student of science, and to judge of him by this utterance alone would be to do him injustice.

It was with the hope of finding some more legitimate objections to the Darwinian theory that I procured the Tribune's lecture-sheet containing Prof. Agassiz's twelve lectures on the natural foundations of organic affinity, and diligently searched it from beginning to end. I believe I am truthful in saying that a good staggering objection would have been quite welcome to me, just for the sake of the intellectual stimulus implied in dealing with it, for on this subject my mind was so thoroughly made up thirteen years ago, that the discussion of it, as ordinarily conducted, has long since ceased to have any interest for me. I am just as firmly convinced that the human race is descended from lower animal forms, as I am that the earth revolves in an elliptical orbit about the sun. So completely, indeed, is this proposition wrought in with my whole mental structure, that the negation of it seems to me utterly nonsensical and void of meaning, and I doubt if my mind is capable of shaping such a negation into a proposition which I could intelligently state. To have such deeply-rooted convictions shaken once in a while is, I believe, a very useful and wholesome experiment in mental hygiene. That rigidity of mind which prevents the thorough revising of our opinions is sure, sooner or later, to come upon all of us; but we ought to dread it, as we dread the stagnation of old age or death. For some such reasons as these, I am sure that I should have been glad to find, in the course of Prof. Agassiz's lectures, at least one powerful argument against the interpretation of organic affinities which Mr. Darwin has done so much to establish. I should have been still more glad to find some alternative interpretation proposed which could deserve to be entertained as scientific in character. I am sure no task could be more delightful, or more quickening to one's energies, than that of comparing two alternative theories upon this subject, upon which, thus far, only one has ever been propounded which possesses the marks of a scientific hypothesis. But no such pleasure or profit is in store for any one who studies these twelve lectures of Prof. Agassiz. In all these lectures, there is not a single allusion to Mr. Darwin's name, save once in a citation from another author; there is not the remotest allusion to any of the arguments by which Mr. Darwin has contributed most largely to the establishment of the development theory; nay, there is not a single sentence from which one could learn that Mr. Darwin's books had ever been written, or that the theories which they expound had ever taken shape in the mind of any thinking man. I do not doubt that Prof. Agassiz has, at