LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
HARROW-ON-THE-HILL. [To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR...]
Si,—In your friendly and interesting article on Harrow in
the Spectator of October 29th you have, I cannot but think, inadvertently misrepresented me. You speak of me as com- plaining that Dr. Vaughan "failed to ground his pupils in
the principles of evolution before Darwin had discovered them." Now, my actual words were these:—
" I left Harrow barely three years before the publication of the 4 Origin of Species ' ; yet, during all the six years that I spent there, no doubt was ever whispered to me as to the accuracy of Archbishop Hasher's Chronology."
In fact, my complaint was, not that Dr. Vaughan did not make us Darwinians before Darwin, but that he let us (so to say) continue liseheritee after Ussher had been dethroned. It is obviously one thing to believe that the world existed much earlier than 4004 B.C.; and it is quite another thing to believe in evolution. Hundreds of good men have held the former view without holding the latter. But it is, I conceive, impossible to hold the latter view without holding the former; and, in fact, my only reason for referring in the foregoing passage to the "Origin of Species" was because, in my opinion, that great work gave the coup de grdce to the old *chronology. Qawd probavit majus probavit minus. It was before I left Harrow that poor Hugh Miller began to wear
o ut his strength by the truly Sisyphean labour of reconciling geology with Genesis. In doing so he frankly admitted—and the admission then required both moral and intellectual courage—that long before the date commonly assigned to the Fall of Adam, animals were constructed with organs designed for the infliction of death, if not of death by torture. Wisely o r unwisely, Dr. Vaughan took a different line. He often spoke in my presence on religious subjects, both in school and privately, but never once did he touch on any such difficulties as those which perplexed Hugh Miller.
Perhaps my general view of Dr. Vaughan's teaching may be expressed by saying that it was thorough, so far as it went, but that it was too safe to be profound; it too com- pletely ignored "the thoughts that shake mankind."—I am,
Rotel d'Angleterre, Biarritz, October 31st.
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