48 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [Nov. 11 
Huxley added vastly to the demonstration, but never added to 
the sum of either theory or working hypothesis, and the con- 
temporary history of the theory proper could be written with- 
out mentioning his name. This lack of speculation upon the 
factors of evolution was true throughout his whole life; in the 
voyage of the ‘ Rattlesnake ” he says he did not even think of 
the species problem. His last utterance regarding the causes of 
evolution appeared in one of the Reviews as a passing criticism 
of Weismann’s finished philosophy, in which he implies that his 
own philosophy of the causes of evolution was as far off as ever ; 
in other words, Huxley never fully made up his mind or com- 
mitted himself to any causal theory of development. 
Taking the nineteenth century at large, outside of our own 
circles of biology, Huxley’s greatest and most permanent 
achievement was his victory for free thought. Personally we 
may not be agnostic; we may disagree with much that he has 
said and written, but we must admire Huxley’s valiant services 
none the less. A reformer must be an extremist, and Huxley 
was often extreme, but he never said what he did not believe to 
be true. If it is easy for you and for me to say what we think 
in print and out of print now, it is because of the battles fought 
by such men as Huxley and Haeckel. When Huxley began his 
great crusade the air was full of religious intolerants, and, what 
is quite as bad, scientific shams. If Huxley had entered the 
contest carefully and guardedly he would have been lost in the 
enemies ranks, but he struck right and left with sledge hammer 
blows, whether it was a high dignity of the Church or of the 
State. Just before the occasion of one of his greatest contests, that 
with Gladstone in the pages of the Contemporary Review, Hux- 
ley was in Switzerland, completely broken down in health and 
suffering from torpidity of the liver. Gladstone had written one 
of his characteristically brilliant articles upon the close cor- 
respondence between the Order of Creation as revealed in the 
first chapter of Genesis and the Order of Evolution as shown 
by modern biology. ‘“‘ When this article reached me,” Huxley 
told me, ‘I read it through and it made me so angry that I 
believe it must have acted upon my liver. At all events, when 
I finished my reply to Gladstone I felt better than I had for 
months past.” 
Huxley’s last public appearance was at the meeting of the 
British Association at Oxford. He had been very urgently in- 
vited to attend, for, exactly a quarter of a century before, the 
Association had met at Oxford and Huxley had had his famous 
encounter with Bishop Wilberforce. It was felt that the anni- 
versary would be an historic one and incomplete without his 
