PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE WAR-PATH. 7 i 



edge is "quite shut out," not because they have by nature no 

 sense enabling them to see it, but because they choose to close its 

 door and to starve it into atrophy. They are the men who can 

 not rise to the higher interpretations even of their own science, 

 or read the discoveries of their own dissecting knife. We accept 

 their teaching as far as it goes, but we "need not and can not 

 accept their mastership. We desire to assimilate every fact which 

 they can prove, and we are grateful for all the thought, and care, 

 and labor, through which alone these facts have been established. 

 But other men must be allowed to see other related facts to which 

 experts may be blind. On any pure question of biology there is 

 no man to whom we can go more safely than to Prof. Huxley. 

 An original and careful investigator, a brilliant expositor, and in 

 many things a cautious reasoner, he enjoys, on his own ground, 

 a high and a just authority. But off that ground he passes iDto 

 the shadows of a great eclipse. He labors under insuperable bias. 

 Through this, and this alone, and through we may be sure no 

 conscious unfaithfulness to truth, there is one great subject on 

 which his judgment is warped by an obvious antipathy. On all 

 questions bearing on " Christian theology " he is not to be trusted 

 for a moment. Loud and confident in matters on which both he 

 and we are profoundly ignorant, we see him hardly less boister- 

 ous in asserting ignorance where the materials of knowledge lie 

 abundant to our hands. We have seen his canons of criticism 

 how rude and undiscerning ; his claim for the physical sciences 

 how inflated ; his own dealings with one of them how shallow 

 and how dogmatic. Prof. Huxley may depend upon it that the 

 time has come when the great questions raised by the indisputable 

 facts of Quaternary geology of which the Deluge is perhaps the 

 least important must be taken out of the hands of men who, by 

 his own confession, have hitherto dwelt with them in no voice 

 more articulate than a smile, and in no attitude more intellectual 

 than a shrug. Nineteenth Century. 



Ik a paper by Prof. Warren Upham, On the Cause of the Glacial Period, it is 

 admitted, on the evidence afforded by a large number of recent independent dis- 

 coveries and calculations, that the date of that period can not be set further back 

 than about ten thousand years ; the dates surmised by Croll and Geikie are there- 

 fore vastly exaggerated and impossible, and with them must fall the cosmical the- 

 ory. Hence new causes must be sought. Prof. Upham looks for them in a higher 

 elevation of the continent, which seems, however, to have been followed by a de- 

 pression under the ice-sheet ; a land barrier existing between Europe and Green- 

 land, and shutting southern waters out from the Arctic Ocean; and a submer- 

 gence of the Isthmus of Panama, turning the southern waters toward the Pacific 

 Ocean. 



