EVOLUTION IN PROFESSOR HUXLEY. 333 



It would be an important approximation toward that philoso- 

 phy on the part of the second Romanes lecturer, if those words of 

 his I have here cited signify an acceptance of the distinction be- 

 tween what is " formal " and what only " material " in the sphere 

 of ethics on the one hand, and an appreciation of the essentially 

 distinct nature of man on the other. His expressions seem to me 

 to justify the hope that the process of mental evolution has in 

 him had this result. 



I can not, however, regard them as decisive. It may be I have 

 been deluded by my earnest wish that those words, 



Whose faith and work were bells of full accord, 



which have been said of a valued friend of us both, may one day 

 also be said of him. If, however, I have been mistaken, I shall 

 not on that account cease to hope that ultimately my wish will be 

 fulfilled. 



For my own part my conviction grows ever stronger that, 

 though cori^oreally man is but a sort of ape, his intellectual na- 

 ture is so distinct that, thus considered, there is more difference 

 between him and the orang than between the latter and the 

 ground beneath its feet. 



But high as he is raised above the rest of Nature, the very 

 limitations of his reason, considered in the light of the highest 

 ethical aspirations of his being, demand something beyond Nature 

 a Divine revelation. 



This is what the higher races of mankind seem to me to have, 

 consciously or unconsciously, sought and striven for, from the 

 dawn of history till the advent of Christianity. The acceptance 

 of that revelation (of course without the surrender of a single 

 truth of physical, biological, historical, or any other science) is, I 

 believe, the logical outcome of the Theistic corollary implied by 

 that power of ethical intuition which so forcibly proclaims both 

 the responsibilities and the dignity of man. The Nineteenth 

 Century. 



An incident related by Persifer Frazer in his biographical sketch, in the 

 American Geologist, of Thomas Sterry Hunt, may be regarded as illustrating the 

 force with which first impressions strike the mind. At the first scientific con- 

 vention which the young chemist and geologist attended, that of the Association of 

 American Geologists and Naturalists, in 1845, Dr. 0. T. Jackson read a communi- 

 cation on the copper and silver of Keweenaw Point, and Prof. H. D. Rogers 

 submitted some remarks on the question of the Taconic rocks, two subjects which 

 afterward received great attention from Dr. Hunt to the last days of his life. 

 "One might easily and perhaps profitably trace," Dr. Frazer remarks, "the 

 origin of many investigations which Dr. Hunt has pursued to brilliant dii^coveries 

 in the sometimes vague but to him suggestive questions and observations at these 

 scientific meetings.'' 



