Misrepresentation in the long run makes Truth as much as it mars
her; hence our law courts do not think it desirable that pleaders
should speak their bona fide opinions, much less that they should
profess to do so. Rather let each side hoodwink judge and jury as
best it can, and let truth flash out from collision of defence and
accusation. When either side will not collide, it is an axiom of
controversy that it desires to prevent the truth from being
elicited.
Let us now note the courses forced upon biologists by the
difficulties of Mr. Darwin's distinctive feature. Mr. Darwin and
Mr. Wallace, as is well known, brought the feature forward
simultaneously and independently of one another, but Mr. Wallace
always believed in it more firmly than Mr. Darwin did. Mr. Darwin
as a young man did not believe in it. He wrote before 1839,
"Nature, by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has
fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country,"
{259a} a sentence than which nothing can coincide more fully with
the older view that use and disuse were the main purveyors of
variations, or conflict more fatally with his own subsequent
distinctive feature.
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