turb this progress of public faith in the theory of evolution, I do not believe. That the special lessons of caution which he inculcates were exemplified by me, years before his voice was heard upon this subject, has been proved in the foregoing pages. It is possible to draw the coincident lines still further, for most of what he has said about spontaneous generation might have been uttered by me. I share his opinion that the theory of evolution in its complete form involves the assumption that at some period or other of the earth's history there occurred what would be now called "spontaneous generation." I agree with him that "the proofs of it are still wanting. . . . Whoever," he says, "recalls to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts made very recently to discover a decided support for the generatio æquivoca in the lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic world will feel it doubly serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our views of life." I hold with Virchow that the failures have been lamentable, that the doctrine is utterly discredited. But my position here is so well known that I need not dwell upon it further.
With one special utterance of Prof. Virchow his translator connects me by name. "I have no objection," observes the professor, "to your saying that atoms of carbon also possess mind, or that in their connection with the Plastidule company they acquire mind; only I do not know how I am to perceive this." This is substantially what I had said seventeen years previously in the Saturday Review. The professor continues: "If I explain attraction and repulsion as exhibitions of mind, as psychical phenomena, I simply throw the Psyche out of the window, and the Psyche ceases to be a Psyche." I may say, in passing, that the Psyche that could be cast out of the window is not worth house-room. At this point the translator, who is evidently a man of culture, strikes in with a foot-note: "As an illustration of Prof. Virchow's meaning, we may quote the conclusion at which Dr. Tyndall arrives respecting the hypothesis of a human soul, offered as an explanation or a simplification of a series of obscure phenomena—psychical phenomena, as he calls them. 'If you are content to make your soul a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary physical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality.' "[1] Prof. Virchow's meaning, I admit, required illustration; but I do not clearly see how the quotation from me subserves this purpose. I do not even know whether I am cited as meriting praise or deserving opprobrium. In a far coarser fashion this utterance of mine has been dealt with in another place: it may therefore be worth while to spend a few words upon it.
The sting of a wasp at the finger-end announces itself to the brain as pain. The impression made by the sting travels, in the first place,
- ↑ Presidential Address delivered before the Birmingham and Midland Institute, October 1, 1877. Fortnightly Review, November 1, 1877, p. 607.
