490 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



the advent of Darwin, however, he was one of the first to be convinced and 

 from that time onwards became one of the most zealous champions of Dar- 

 winism — its general agent, as he himself jokingly remarked. He took part 

 in the earliest controversy on The Origin of Species, contributing a paper that 

 proves how understanding and at the same time how independent was his 

 attitude towards Darwin's theory from the very outset. In the first place, 

 he has not Darwin's blind faith in the absolute dominance of the small 

 variations in nature. He cites as an example of sudden changes the oft- 

 quoted ancon or otter sheep of America, whose sudden appearance is a 

 well-known fact, and further, borrowing from Reaumur, the story of a fam- 

 ily that had a child with an excessive number of fingers and toes, which 

 phenomenon was afterwards inherited by its descendants. The arising of the 

 otter sheep is an obvious mutation; from the appearance of the supernumer- 

 ary fingers, again, conclusions might have been drawn in the spirit of Mendel. 

 This, however, was not done; even in the moderate form that Huxley gave to 

 his divergences from the true selection-theory, they attracted no attention; 

 small indeed would the variations have to be for the struggle for existence 

 and selection to have any material effect on them, and what interest could be 

 awakened by the story of the inheritance of six fingers? On the basis of such 

 exact observations of detail one came no closer to the theory of creation, 

 which, indeed, was the main idea at that time. Regret has often been ex- 

 pressed that Mendel's observations were published in such an out-of-the- 

 way place that no one noticed them; it is more than likely that the result 

 would have been the same wherever they had appeared; the fact is, the 

 time was not yet ripe for them. — However, Huxley's objections to the 

 master's theories were not numerous, nor were they bitter; he took far greater 

 pains to defend what good he found in them, which, indeed, was a very 

 great deal. And in contrast to Darwin himself, Huxley was a born controver- 

 sialist, with an ever-wakeful pugnacity, a never-failing promptness in reply, 

 an extensive knowledge of books, and a rare gift of putting the most in- 

 volved questions in a fluent and easily understood style. For the rest, his 

 polemics are always courteous; sceptic as he is, he confronts his opponent 

 with a supercilious, but not always a friendly, smile, and he never allows his 

 composure to be ruffled, nor himself to be reduced to silence. He particularly 

 enjoyed crossing swords with men of the Church, and on that battlefield 

 there were certainly to be found opponents en masse so long as he lived. 

 Among them was Gladstone, the great Liberal statesman, who was also 

 an extremely learned and highly conservative theologian. At one period 

 during the eighties Huxley entered into a controversy with him — the fore- 

 most biologist against the leading statesman in England at that time — 

 concerning the gospel story of the Gadarene swine, which were drowned 

 after the Devil had entered into them. Rather more urgent problems were 



