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Updated: June 21, 2025
Mivart's greatest error, the confounding "individual variations" with "minute or imperceptible variations," is well exposed by C. Wright, and that part I should like to see reprinted; but I always thought you laid too much stress on the slowness of the action of Natural Selection owing to the smallness and rarity of favourable variations.
Mivart's objections, it may be well to explain once again how natural selection will act in all ordinary cases. Man has modified some of his animals, without necessarily having attended to special points of structure, by simply preserving and breeding from the fleetest individuals, as with the race-horse and greyhound, or as with the game-cock, by breeding from the victorious birds.
I must admit, however, that the telling of that story seems to me to be a mistake in a philosophical work, which should not, I think, unless under compulsion, deal either with the horrors of the French Revolution or of the Spanish or Italian Inquisition. For the rest of Mr. Mivart's objections, I must refer the reader to his own work.
But, by this declaration, the person most directly interested in the matter repudiates, by anticipation, Mr. Mivart's suggestion that Mr. Darwin's eminence is more or less due to Mr. Wallace's modesty.
Mivart's hypothesis, must have used words studiously calculated to deceive his creatures and worshippers, is 'no religion worthy of the name. 'Incredibile est, Deum illis verbis ad populum fuisse locutum quibis deciperetur, is a verdict in which for once Jesuit casuistry concurs with the healthy moral sense of all mankind." Mr. Lay Sermons, etc. p. 331. Büchner. Dr.
It is incumbent upon me both to see how far Mr. Mivart's objections are weighty as against Mr. Darwin, and also whether or not they tell with equal force against the view which I am myself advocating.
In your chapter on Natural Selection the expressions, "extremely slight modifications," "every variation even the slightest," "every grade of constitutional difference," occur, and these have led to errors such as Mivart's, I say all this because I feel sure that Mivart would be the last to intentionally misrepresent you, and he has told me that he was sorry the word "infinitesimal," as applied to variations used by Natural Selection, got into his book, and that he would alter it, as no doubt he has done, in his second edition.
He had written from Paris to Cleveland to announce it; and Cleveland had, in reply, informed him that he had engaged apartments for him at Mivart's. The smiling waiters ushered him into a spacious and well-aired room the armchair was already wheeled by the fire a score or so of letters strewed the table, together with two of the evening papers.
Darwin, "has recently collected all the objections which have ever been advanced by myself and others against the theory of natural selection, as propounded by Mr. I have already referred the reader to Mr. Mivart's work, but quote the above passage as showing that Mr. Mivart will not, probably, be found to have left much unsaid that would appear to make against Mr. Darwin's theory.
He had written from Paris to Cleveland to announce it; and Cleveland had, in reply, informed him that he had engaged apartments for him at Mivart's. The smiling waiters ushered him into a spacious and well-aired room the armchair was already wheeled by the fire a score or so of letters strewed the table, together with two of the evening papers.
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