THE BATTLE FOR EVOLUTION
Huxley's Prevision of the Battle--The Causes of the Battle--The
_Times_ Review--Sir Richard Owen attacks Darwinism in the
_Edinburgh Review_--Bishop Wilberforce attacks in the _Quarterly
Review_--Huxley's Scathing Replies--The British Association
Debates at Oxford--Huxley and Wilberforce--Résumé of Huxley's
Exact Position with Regard to Evolution and to Natural Selection.
When Huxley wrote thanking Darwin for the first copy of the _Origin_,
he warned him of the annoyance and abuse he might expect from those
whose opinions were too suddenly disturbed by the new exposition of
evolution, and assured him of the strongest personal support:
"I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted
or annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation which,
unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you. Depend upon it,
you have earned the lasting gratitude of all thoughtful men; and
as to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that
some of your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of
combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it)
may stand you in good stead.
"I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness."
Huxley was absolutely right in his prediction as to the magnitude of
the prejudices to be overcome before evolution became accepted, and
for the next thirty years of his life he was the leader in the battle
for Darwinism. It was natural that the new views, especially in their
extension to man himself, should arouse the keenest opposition. To
those of the present generation, who have grown up in an atmosphere
impregnated by the doctrine of descent, the position of the world in
1860 seems "older than a tale written in any book." As we have tried
to shew in the preceding chapter, biological science was partially
prepared; the mutability of species and the orderly succession of
organic life were in the air. But the application of the doctrine to
man came as a greater shock to civilised sentiment than would have
occurred a century earlier. It came as a disaster even to the clearest
and calmest intellects, for it seemed to drag down to the dirt the
nobility of man. Out of the fierce flame of the French Revolution,
there had come purged and clean the conception of man as an individual
and soul. As this century advanced, the conception of the dignity and
worth of each individual man, rich or poor, bond or free, had spread
more and more widely, bearing as its fruit the emancipation of slaves,
the spread of political freedom, the amelioration of the conditions of
the dregs of humanity, the right of all to education, the possibility
of universal peace based on the brotherhood of man; and all that was
best in philosophy and in political practice seemed bound up with a
lofty view of the unit of mankind. Carlyle himself, to whom many of
the freest and noblest spirits in Europe were beginning to look as to
an inspired prophet, could see in it nothing but a "monkey
damnification of mankind." The dogmatic world saw in it nothing but a
deliberate and malicious assault upon religion. The Church of England
in particular was beginning to recover from a long period of almost
incredible supineness, and there was arising a large body of clergy
full of faith and zeal and good works, but quite unacquainted with
science, who frankly regarded Darwin as Antichrist, and Huxley and
Tyndall as emissaries of the devil. Against evolutionists there was
left unused no weapon that ignorant prejudice could find, whether that
prejudice was inspired by a lofty zeal for what it conceived to be the
highest interests of humanity, or by a crafty policy which saw in the
new doctrine a blow to the coming renewed supremacy of the Church. To
us, now, it may seem that Huxley had "sharpened his beak and claws"
with the spirit of a gladiator rather than with that of the mere
defender of a scientific doctrine; but a very short study of
contemporary literature will convince anyone that for a time the
defenders of evolution had to defend not only what they knew to be
scientific truth, but their personal and private reputation. The new
doctrine, like perhaps all the great doctrines that have come into the
world, brought not peace but a sword, and had to be defended by the
sword. Darwin had not the kind of disposition nor the particular
faculties necessary for a deadly contest of this kind; he was
interested indeed above all things in convincing a few leading
naturalists of the truth of his opinions; but, that done, he would
have been contented to continue his own work quietly, in absolute
carelessness as to what the world in general thought of him. Huxley,
on the other hand, was incapable of restraining himself from
propagating what he knew to be the truth; his reforming missionary
spirit was not content simply with self-defence; it drove him to be a
bishop _in partibus infidelium_.
By a curious and interesting accident, Huxley had the opportunity of
beginning his propagandism by writing the first great review of _The
Origin of Species_ in the _Times_, at that period without question the
leading journal in the world. Huxley's own account of this happy
chance is given in _Darwin's Life and Letters_, vol. ii.
"The _Origin_ was sent to Mr. Lucas, one of the staff of the
_Times_ writers at that day, in what I suppose was the ordinary
course of business. Mr. Lucas, though an excellent journalist,
and at a later period editor of _Once a Week_, was as innocent of
any knowledge of science as a babe, and bewailed himself to an
acquaintance on having to deal with such a book, whereupon he was
recommended to ask me to get him out of his difficulty, and he
applied to me accordingly, explaining, however, that it would be
necessary for him formally to adopt anything I might be disposed
to write, by prefacing it with two or three paragraphs of his
own.
"I was too anxious to seize on the opportunity thus offered of
giving the book a fair chance with the multitudinous readers of
the _Times_ to make any difficulty about conditions; and being
then very full of the subject, I wrote the article faster, I
think, than I ever wrote anything in my life, and sent it to Mr.
Lucas, who duly prefixed his opening sentences. When the article
appeared, there was much speculation as to its authorship. The
secret leaked out in time, as all secrets will, but not by my
aid; and then I used to derive a good deal of innocent amusement
from the vehement assertions of some of my more acute friends,
that they knew it was mine from the first paragraph." "As the
_Times_ some years since referred to my connection with the
review, I suppose there will be no breach of confidence in the
publication of this little history."
This review was one of the few favourable notices, and naturally it
delighted Darwin greatly. He wrote to Hooker about it: "Have you seen
the splendid essay and notice of my book in the _Times_? I cannot
avoid a strong suspicion that it is by Huxley; but I have never heard
that he wrote in the _Times_. It will do grand service." On the same
day, writing to Huxley himself, he said of the review:
"It included an eulogium of me which quite touched me, although I
am not vain enough to think it all deserved. The author is a
literary man and a German scholar. He has read my book
attentively; but, what is very remarkable, it seems that he is a
profound naturalist. He knows my barnacle book and appreciates it
too highly. Lastly, he writes and thinks with quite uncommon
force and clearness; and, what is even still rarer, his writing
is seasoned with most pleasant wit. We all laughed heartily over
some of the sentences.... Who can it be? Certainly I should have
said that there was only one man in England who could have
written this essay, and that you were the man; but I suppose that
I am wrong, and that there is some hidden genius of great
calibre; for how could you influence Jupiter Olympus and make him
give you three and a half columns to pure science? The old fogies
will think the world will come to an end. Well, whoever the man
is, he has done great service to the cause."
The essay in the _Times_ was followed shortly afterwards by a "Friday
Evening Discourse" in 1860 on "Species, Races, and their Origin," in
which Huxley, addressing a cultivated audience, laid the whole weight
of his brilliant scientific reputation on the side of evolution. Next,
in April, 1860, he published a long article in the _Westminster
Review_, then a leading organ of advanced opinion, on _The Origin of
Species_, some quotations from which article were made in the last
chapter. Apart from its strong support of the doctrine of evolution,
its whole-hearted praise of Darwin's achievements, and the clear way
in which, while it showed the value of natural selection as the only
satisfactory hypothesis in the field, it gave reasons for regarding it
strictly as an hypothesis, the review is specially interesting as a
contrast to reviews which appeared about the same time in the
_Edinburgh Review_ and in the _Quarterly_. Both these were not only
exceedingly unfavourable, but were written in a spirit of personal
abuse singularly unworthy of their authors and still more of their
subject. The review in the _Edinburgh_ had come as a particularly
great shock to Darwin, Huxley, and their friends. Sir Richard Owen, in
many ways, was at that time the most distinguished anatomist in
England. He had been an ardent follower of Cuvier, and in England had
carried on the palæontological work of the great Frenchman. He was a
personal friend of the court, a well-known man in the best society,
and in many ways a worthy upholder of the best traditions of science.
In the particular matter of species, he was known to be by no means a
firm supporter of the orthodox views. When Darwin's paper was read at
the Linnæan Society, and afterwards when the _Origin_ was published,
the verdict of Owen was looked to with the greatest interest by the
general public. For a time he wavered, and even expressed himself of
the opinion that he had already in his published works included a
considerable portion of Darwin's views. But two things seemed to have
influenced him: First, Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and Sedgwick
and Whewell, the two best-known men at Cambridge, urged him to stamp
once for all, as he only could do, upon this "new and pernicious
doctrine." Secondly, combined with his great abilities, he had the
keenest personal interest in his own position as the leader of English
science, and had no particular friendship for men or for views that
seemed likely to threaten his own supreme position. In a very short
time he changed from being neutral, with a tendency in favour of the
new views, to being a bitter opponent of them. In scientific societies
and in London generally, naturally enough he constantly came across
the younger scientific men, such as Huxley and Hooker, who had
declared for Darwin, and he made the irretrievable mistake of for a
time attempting to disguise his opposition while he was writing the
most bitter of all the articles against Darwinism. That appeared in
the _Edinburgh Review_ in April, 1860, and the range of knowledge it
displayed, and the form of arguments employed, naturally enough
betrayed the secret of its authorship, although Owen for very long
attempted to conceal his connection with it. Darwin, who had the most
unusual generosity towards his opponents, found this review too much
for him. Writing to Lyell soon after its publication, he said:
"I have just read the _Edinburgh_, which, without doubt is by
----. It is extremely malignant, clever, and, I fear, will be
very damaging. He is atrociously severe on Huxley's lecture, and
very bitter against Hooker. So we three _enjoyed_ it together.
Not that I really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for
one night; but I have quite got over it to-day. It requires much
study to appreciate all the bitter spite of many of the remarks
against me; indeed I did not discover all myself. It scandalously
misrepresents many parts. He misquotes some passages, altering
words within inverted commas.... It is painful to be hated in the
intense degree with which ---- hates me."
As Owen was still alive when this letter was published in _Darwin's
Life_, the authorship of the review was not actually mentioned; but it
is necessary to mention it, as it justifies the sternness with which
Huxley exposed Owen on an occasion shortly to be described. The review
in the _Quarterly_ was written by Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford,
in July, 1860, and almost at once the authorship of it became known
to Darwin's friends. In connection with this, Huxley wrote in 1887, in
_Darwin's Life and Letters_:
"I doubt if there was any man then living who had a better right
(than Darwin) to expect that anything he might choose to say on
such a question as the Origin of Species would be listened to
with profound attention, and discussed with respect. And there
was certainly no man whose personal character should have
afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct with
malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences. Yet such was
the portion of one of the kindest and truest men that it was ever
my good fortune to know; and years had to pass away before
misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation ceased to be the
most notable constituents of the majority of the multitudinous
criticisms of his work which poured from the press. I am loth to
rake up any of these ancient scandals from their well-deserved
oblivion; but I must make good a statement which may seem
overcharged to the present generation, and there is no _pièce
justificative_ more apt for the purpose or more worthy of such
dishonour than the article in the _Quarterly Review_ for July,
1860. Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen
no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a
Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of
the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most
candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to
scorn as a 'flighty' person who endeavours to 'prop up his
utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode
of dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable
to natural science.' And all this high and mighty talk, which
would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds
from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of
both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's
views, he can ask, 'Is it credible that all favourable varieties
of turnips are tending to become men'; who is so ignorant of
palæontology that he can talk of the 'flowers and fruits' of the
plants of the carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that
he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of venomous snakes to
be 'entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and
peculiar to themselves'; of the rudiments of physiology, that he
can ask, 'what advantage of life could alter the shape of the
corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?' Nor does the
reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of incapacity with a
little stimulation of the _odium theologicum_. Some inkling of
the history of the conflicts between astronomy, geology, and
theology leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he
cannot 'consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the Word
of Revelation,' but for all that he devotes pages to the
exposition of his conviction that Mr. Darwin's theory
'contradicts the revealed relation of the creation to its
Creator,' and is 'inconsistent with the fulness of His glory.'"
In a footnote to this passage, Huxley wrote that he was not aware when
writing these lines that the authorship of the article had been avowed
publicly. He adds, however:
"Confession unaccompanied by penitence, however, affords no
ground for mitigation of judgment; and the kindliness with which
Mr. Darwin speaks of his assailant, Bishop Wilberforce, is so
striking an exemplification of his singular gentleness and
modesty, that it rather increases one's indignation against the
presumption of his critic."
As a matter of fact Wilberforce was a man of no particular information
in letters or in philosophy, and his knowledge of science was of the
vaguest: a little natural history picked up from Gosse, the naturalist
of the seashore, in the course of a few days' casual acquaintance at
the seaside, and some pieces of anatomical facts with which he was
provided, it is supposed, by Owen, for the purposes of the review. But
he bore a great name, and misused a great position; he was a man of
facile intelligence, smooth, crafty, and popular, and in this case he
was convinced that he was doing the best possible for the great
interests of religion by authoritatively denouncing a man whose
character he was incapable of realising, and on whose work he was
incompetent to pronounce an opinion. Against an enemy of this kind,
Huxley was implacable and relentless. He was constitutionally
incapable of tolerating pretentious ignorance, and he had realised
from the first that there could be no question of giving and taking
quarter from persons who were more concerned to suppress doctrines
they conceived to be dangerous than to examine into their truth. On
the other hand, much as Huxley disliked Owen's devious ways, and
although in after life there occurred many and severe differences of
opinion between Huxley and Owen, Huxley had a sincere respect for much
of Owen's anatomical and palæontological work, and when, in 1894,
Owen's _Life_ was published, one of the most interesting parts of it
was a long, fair, and appreciative review by Huxley of Owen's
contributions to knowledge.
The middle of 1860, however, was not a time for Huxley, in his
capacity as Darwin's chief defender, to make truce with the enemy. In
England a certain number of well-known scientific men had given a
general support to Darwinism. From France, Germany, and America there
had come some support and a good deal of cold criticism, but most
people were simmering with disturbed emotions. The newspapers and the
reviews were full of the new subject; political speeches and sermons
were filled with allusions to it. Wherever educated people talked the
conversation came round to the question of evolution. Were animals and
plants the results of special creations, or were they, including man,
the result of the gradual transformations of a few simple primitive
types evolving under the stress of some such force as Darwin's natural
selection? To many people it seemed to be a choice between a world
with God and a world without God; and the accredited defenders of
religion gathered every force of argument, of misrepresentation,
conscious and unconscious, of respectability, and of prejudice to
crush once for all the obnoxious doctrine and its obnoxious
supporters. In the autumn of that year it fell that the meeting of the
British Association, then coming into prominence as the annual
parliament of the sciences, was to be held at Oxford. It was
inevitable that evolution should be debated formally and informally in
the sessions of the Association, and it must have seemed to the
orthodox that there, in that beautiful city, its air vibrant with
tinkling calls to faith, its halls and libraries crowded with the
devout and the learned, its history and traditions alike calling on
all to defend the old fair piety, in such an uncongenial air, the
supporters of evolution must be overwhelmed. Almost the whole weight
of the attack had to be resisted by Huxley. In the various sectional
meetings he had combat after combat with professors and clerics. Of
these dialectic fights the most notable were one with Owen on the
anatomical structure of the brain, and another with Wilberforce upon
the general question of evolution. Owen contended that there were
anatomical differences not merely of degree but of kind between the
brain of man and the brain of the highest ape, and his remarks were
accepted by the audience as a complete and authoritative blow to the
theory of descent. Huxley at once met Owen with a direct and flat
contradiction, and pledged his reputation to justify his contradiction
with all due detail on a further occasion. As a matter of fact, he did
justify the contradiction, and no anatomist would now dream of
attempting the support of the proposition rashly made by Owen; but,
at the time, the position of Owen and the sympathies of the audience
took away much of their effect from Huxley's words. Two days later,
Wilberforce, in a scene of considerable excitement, made a long,
eloquent, and declamatory speech against evolution and against Huxley.
From the incomplete reports of the debate that were published, it is
difficult to gain a very clear idea of the Bishop's speech; but it is
certain that it was eloquent and facile, and that it appealed strongly
to the religious prejudices of the majority of the audience. He ended
by a gibe which, under ordinary circumstances, might have passed
simply as the rude humour of a popular orator, but which in that
electric atmosphere stung Huxley into a retort that has become
historical. He asked Huxley whether he was related by his
grandfather's or grandmother's side to an ape. Huxley replied:
I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed
of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor
whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a _man_, a man
of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an
equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into
scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only
to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the
attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent
digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
An eye-witness has told the present writer that Huxley's speech
produced little effect at the time. In the minds of those of the
audience best qualified to weigh biological arguments, there was
little doubt but that he had refuted Owen, and simply dispelled the
vaporous effusions of the Bishop; but the majority of the audience
retained the old convictions. The combat was removed to a wider
tribunal. From that time forwards Huxley, by a series of essays,
addresses, and investigations, continued almost to the end of his
life, tried to convince, and succeeded in convincing, the intellectual
world. At the risk of wearying by repetition we shall again insist
upon the side of Darwinism that Huxley fought for and triumphed for.
Long before the time of Darwin and Huxley, almost at the beginning of
recorded thought, philosophers busied themselves with the wonderful
diversity of the living world and with speculations as to how it had
assumed its present form. From the earliest times to this century,
theories as to the living world fell into one or other of two main
groups. The key-note of one group was the fixity of species: the
belief that from their first appearance species were separate,
independent entities, one never springing from another, new species
never arising by the modification in different directions of
descendants of already existing species. The key-note of the other
group of theories was the idea of progressive change: that animals and
plants as they passed along the stream of time were continually being
moulded by the forces surrounding them, and that the farther back the
mind could go in imagination the fewer and simpler species would be;
until, in the first beginning, all the existing diverse kinds of
living creatures would converge to a single point. It may be that, on
the whole, the idea of fixity prevailed more among thinkers with a
religious bias; but for the most part the theories were debated
independently of the tenets of any faith, Christian or other. There
were sceptical defenders of fixity and religious upholders of
evolution. However, in Christian countries, from the time of the
Reformation onwards, a change in this neutrality of religion to
theories of the living world took place. As Pascal prophesied,
Protestantism rejected the idea of an infallible Church in favour of
the idea of an infallible book, and, because it happened that this
book included an early legend of the origin of the world in a form
apparently incompatible with evolution, Protestantism and, to a lesser
and secondary extent, Catholicism, assumed the position that there was
no place for evolution in a Christian philosophy. At the end of last
century, and up to the middle of this century, the problem was not
raised in any acute form. The chief anatomists and botanists were
occupied with the investigation and discovery of facts, and, in an
ordinary way, without taking any particular trouble about it, accepted
more or less loosely the idea that species were fixed. Now and then an
evolutionist propounded his views; but, as a rule, he supported them
with a knowledge of facts very much inferior to that possessed by the
more orthodox school. Then came Herbert Spencer, reasserting evolution
in the old broad spirit, not merely in its application to species, but
as the guiding principle of the whole universe from the integrations
of nebulæ into systems of suns and planets to the transformations of
chemical bodies. Before his marvellous generalisations had time to
grip biologists, there came Darwin; and Darwin brought two things:
first, a re-statement of the fact of evolution as applied to the
living world, supported by an enormous body of evidence, new and old,
presented with incomparably greater force, clearness, patience, and
knowledge than had ever been seen before; and, second, the exposition
of the principle of natural selection as a mechanism which might have
caused, and probably did cause, evolution.
Huxley, as has been shewn, like many other anatomists, was ready for
the general principle of evolution. In fact, so far as it concerned
the great independent types which he believed to exist among animals,
he was more than prepared for it. Let us take a single definite
example of his position. In his work on the Medusæ, he had shewn how a
large number of creatures, at first sight diverse, were really
modifications of a single great type, and he used language which, now
that all zoölogists accept evolution in the fullest way, requires no
change to be understood:
"What has now been advanced will, perhaps, be deemed evidence
sufficient to demonstrate,--first, that the organs of these
various families are traceable back to the same point in the way
of development; or, secondly, when this cannot be done, that they
are connected by natural gradations with organs which are so
traceable; in which case, according to the principles advanced in
57, the various organs are homologous, and the families have a
real affinity to one another and should form one group.... It
appears, then, that these five families are by no means so
distinct as has hitherto been supposed, but that they are members
of one great group, organised upon one simple and uniform plan,
and, even in their most complex and aberrant forms, reducible to
the same type. And I may add, finally, that on this theory it is
by no means difficult to account for the remarkable forms
presented by the Medusæ in their young state. The Medusæ are the
most perfect, the most individualised animals of the series, and
it is only in accordance with what very generally obtains in the
animal kingdom, if, in their early condition, they approximate
towards the simplest forms of the group to which they belong."
Such words, written before 1849, only differ from those that would
have been written by a convinced evolutionist by a hair's breadth. But
Huxley was not an evolutionist then: it was Darwin's work, containing
a new exposition of evolution and the new principle of natural
selection, that convinced him, not of natural selection but of
evolution. At Oxford, in 1860, it was for evolution, and not for
natural selection, that he spoke; and throughout his life afterwards,
as he expressed it, it was this "ancient doctrine of evolution,
rehabilitated and placed upon a sound scientific foundation, since,
and in consequence of, the publication of _The Origin of Species_,"
that furnished him with the chief inspiration of his work. The clear
accuracy of his original judgment upon Darwin's work has been
abundantly justified by subsequent history. Since 1859 the case for
evolution has become stronger and stronger until it can no longer be
regarded as one of two possible hypotheses in the field, but as the
only view credible to those who have even a moderate acquaintance with
the facts. In 1894, thirty years after the famous meeting at Oxford,
the British Association again met in that historic town. The
President, Lord Salisbury, a devout Churchman and with a notably
critical intellect, declared of Darwin:
"He has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the
immutability of species.... Few now are found to doubt that
animals separated by differences far exceeding those that
distinguish what we know as species have yet descended from
common ancestors."
Huxley, in replying to the address, used the following words:
"As he noted in the Presidential Address to which they had just
listened with such well deserved interest, he found it stated, on
what was then and at this time the highest authority for them,
that as a matter of fact the doctrine of the immutability of
species was disposed of and gone. He found that few were now
found to doubt that animals separated by differences far
exceeding those which they knew as species were yet descended
from a common ancestry. Those were their propositions; those were
the fundamental principles of the doctrine of evolution."
On the other hand, Huxley all through his life, while holding that
natural selection was by far the most probable hypothesis as to the
mode in which evolution had come about, maintained that it was only a
hypothesis, and, unlike evolution, not a proved fact. In 1863, in a
course of lectures to workingmen, he declared:
"I really believe that the alternative is either Darwinism or
nothing, for I do not know of any rational conception or theory
of the organic universe which has any scientific position at all
beside Mr. Darwin's.... But you must recollect that when I say I
think it is either Mr. Darwin's hypothesis or nothing; that
either we must take his view, or look upon the whole of organic
nature as an enigma, the meaning of which is wholly hidden from
us; you must understand that I mean that I accept it
provisionally, in exactly the same way as I accept any other
hypothesis."
In 1878 he wrote:
"How far natural selection suffices for the production of species
remains to be seen. Few can doubt that, if not the whole cause,
it is a very important factor in that operation; and that it must
play a great part in the sorting out of varieties into those
which are transitory and those which are permanent."
The difficulty in accepting natural selection as more than a
hypothesis is simply that we have no experimental knowledge of its
being able to produce the mutual infertility which is so striking a
character of species. This difficulty is, in the first place, the
difficulty of proving a negative. It might be possible to prove that
its operation actually does produce species; it will always be
impossible to prove that, in the past, natural selection, and no other
known or unknown agency or combination of agencies, had a share in
the process. All naturalists are now agreed that, as a matter of
historical fact, it was the propounding of natural selection by Darwin
that led to the acceptance of evolution, to the fact that evolution
"takes its place alongside of those accepted truths which must be
reckoned with by philosophers of all schools." The difficulty as to
natural selection still exists, and there is no better way to express
it than in Huxley's words, written in the early sixties:
"But, for all this, our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis
must be provisional so long as one link in the chain of evidence
is wanting; and, so long as all the animals and plants certainly
produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile
with one another, that link will be wanting; for, so long,
selective breeding will not be proved to be competent to do all
that is required of it to produce natural species.... I adopt Mr.
Darwin's hypothesis, therefore, subject to the production of
proof that physiological species may be produced by selective
breeding; just as a physical philosopher may accept the
undulatory theory of light, subject to the proof of the existence
of the hypothetical ether; or as the chemist adopts the atomic
theory, subject to the proof of the existence of atoms; and for
exactly the same reasons, namely, that it has an immense amount
of _prima facie_ probability; that it is the only means at
present within reach of reducing the chaos of observed facts to
order; and, lastly, that it is the most powerful instrument of
investigation which has been presented to the naturalists since
the invention of the natural system of classification, and the
commencement of the systematic study of embryology."--_Man's
Place in Nature_, p. 149.[E]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote E: Further details on the subject of this chapter may be
obtained in Clodd's excellent volume, _Pioneers of Evolution_, where
an account of the history of the idea of evolution from the earliest
times is given; and in Poulton's _Charles Darwin and the Theory of
Natural Selection_, where there is a particularly valuable chapter
upon Huxley's relation to Darwinism.]