7 3o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



some special use ? And if he does, how does he account for that 

 adaptation arising exactly when and where it is needed ? Was it 

 purely accidental ? Does he worship at the shrine of the great 

 goddess Fortuity ? Where is his " passion for clearness " when 

 all these questions are evaded ? If he finds such mysteries in a 

 purely physical science, why should he sneer at conceptions also 

 " seen through a glass darkly/' in the spiritual regions of belief ? 

 He is certainly narrower than the higher aspects even of his own 

 pursuit. But, besides the cramping effect of all specialisms when 

 exclusive, Prof. Huxley has most clearly approached the subject 

 under the strongest animus. "The slings and arrows of out- 

 rageous " clerics at church congresses seem to goad him on. His 

 one desire appears to be to trample on them. If he can here and 

 there catch some popular divine committing himself to some argu- 

 ment or idea which may be ridden to the death, he hugs it with 

 effusion. He gives it the requisite dressings of his own verbal 

 evolution. Then turning round he endeavors to tie down the 

 whole of Christian theology to ridiculous conclusions under the 

 choppings of a childish logic. 



But there is one thing we had a right to expect from Prof. 

 Huxley, and that is, that when in the course of his argument he 

 comes across questions of purely physical science, he should treat 

 them as candidly and fairly when they are supposed to bear upon 

 " Christian theology " as when he delivers a scientific lecture or 

 writes an article for an encyclopaedia. Yet this is just what he 

 has failed to do in the case before us. His canons of biblical in- 

 terpretation are not more crude and violent than his dealings with 

 the discoveries of geology, and still worse, if possible, his dealings 

 with the things which geology has not yet discovered. I proceed 

 to define and illustrate what I mean. 



Prof. Huxley selects the story of the Deluge as his particular 

 battle-horse in the fight. He is quite right, and well within his 

 right, in doing so. That story is special in the fact that it pur- 

 ports to give an account of an event within the limits of human 

 experience, and that in doing so it narrates occurrences which 

 may to some extent be brought within the cognizance of discov- 

 ery in more than one branch of physical science. Prof. Huxley 

 has a very definite theory as to the origin of the story. He thinks 

 it probably arose out of some terrible inundation of the two great 

 rivers of Mesopotamia.* This is quite an intelligible hypothesis, 

 since we know from the facts of our own day, in the case of the 

 Yellow River in China, what an enormous destruction of human 

 life may be caused by river floods bursting in upon low, flat plains 

 thickly peopled. But this hypothesis fails to give any adequate 



* Pages 14, 15. 



