HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF EVOLUTION THEORY 



29 



collect in the germ cells. This was supposed to account for the fact 

 that from the germ cell will develop an organism like the parent in 

 various details. If a part of the body was modified through func- 

 tioning or through changed environment, it would have modified 

 gemmules, which, in turn, would go to the germ cells and carry over 

 the modification to the next generation. This theory was not satis- 

 factory even to Darwin and is now only of historical interest. 



Spencer is best known in the history of the evolution theory as an 

 ardent neo-Lamarckian. He states his belief as follows: " Change of 

 function produces change of structure; it is a tenable hypothesis that 

 changes of structure so produced are inherited. " This idea prevailed 

 until it was cast down by Weismann. 



Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), one of the keenest, most analyti- 

 cal thinkers of the nineteenth century, not only defended the general 

 doctrine of evolution against Bishop Wilberforce and his aids, but was 

 an able investigator in the fields of comparative anatomy and embry- 

 ology. "At the British Association at Oxford in 1860," says Judd, 

 "after an American professor had indignantly asked 'Are we a 

 fortuitous concourse of atoms?' as a comment on Darwin's views, 

 Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, ended a clever but 

 flippant attack on the Origin by enquiring of Huxley, who was present 

 as Darwin's champion, if it 'was through his grandfather or his grand- 

 mother that he claimed his descent from a monkey ? ' 



"Huxley made the famous and well-deserved retort : '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 ashamed of recalling, it would rather be a man a man of restless 

 and versatile intellect who not content with success in his own sphere 

 of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real 

 acquaintance, only to obscure them by aimless rhetoric, and distract 

 the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent 

 digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice!' 



"Huxley himself accepted the theory of Natural Selection but 

 not without some important reservations these, however, did not 

 prevent him from becoming its most ardent and successful champion. 

 Darwin used to acknowledge Huxley's great service to him in under- 

 taking the defense of the theory a defense which his own hatred of 

 controversy and state of health made him unwilling to undertake- 

 by laughingly calling him 'my general agent' while Huxley himself in 

 replying to the critics, declared he was 'Darwin's bulldog." 



