THE INTERPRETERS OF GENESIS AND NATURE. 449 



THE INTERPRETERS OF GENESIS AND THE INTER- 

 PRETERS OF NATURE. 



By Peofessob T. II. HUXLEY. 



OUR fabulist warns "those who in quarrels interpose" of the fate 

 which is probably in store for them ; and, in venturing to place 

 myself between so powerful a controversialist as Mr. Gladstone and 

 the eminent divine whom he assaults with such vigor in the last num- 

 ber of this review, I am fully aware that I run great danger of veri- 

 fying Gay's prediction. Moreover, it is quite possible that my zeal in 

 offering aid to a combatant so extremely well able to take care of him- 

 self as M. Reville may be thought to savor of indiscretion. 



Two considerations, however, have led me to face the double risk. 

 The one is that though, in my judgment, M. Reville is wholly in the 

 right in that part of the controversy to which I propose to restrict my 

 observations, nevertheless, he, as a foreigner, has very little chance of 

 making the truth prevail with Englishmen against the authority and 

 the dialectic skill of the greatest master of persuasive rhetoric among 

 English-speaking men of our time. As the Queen's proctor intervenes, 

 in certain cases, between two litigants in the interests of justice, so it 

 may be permitted me to interpose as a sort of uncommissioned science 

 proctor. My second excuse for my meddlesomeness is, that important 

 questions of natural science — respecting which neither of the combat- 

 ants professes to speak as an expert — are involved in the controversy ; 

 and I think it is desirable that the public should know what it is that 

 natural science really has to say on these topics, to the best belief of 

 one who has been a diligent student of natural science for the last 

 forty years. 



The original " Prolegom^nes de I'histoire des Religions" has not 

 come in my way; but I have read the translation of M. Reville's work, 

 published in England under the auspices of Professor Max Miiller, with 

 very great interest. It puts more fairly and clearly than any book 

 previously known to me the view which a man of strong religious feel- 

 ings, but at the same time possessing the information and the reason- 

 ing power which enable him to estimate the strength of scientific 

 methods of inquiry and the weight of scientific truth, may be expected 

 to take of the relation between science and religion. 



In the chapter on " The Primitive Revelation " the scientific worth 

 of the account of the Creation given in the Book of Genesis is esti- 

 mated in terms which are as unquestionably respectful as, in my judg- 

 ment, they are just; and, at the end of the chapter on "Primitive 

 Tradition," M. Reville appraises the value of pentateuchal anthropol- 

 ogy in a way which I should have thought sure of enlisting the assent 



VOL. XXTIII. — 29 



