200 HUXLEY AND NATURAL SELECTION 



up to that time, the evidence in favour of transmutation 

 was wholly insufficient ; and, secondly, that no suggestion 

 respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which 

 had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the 

 phenomena.' 1 'So,' he tells us, ' I usually defended the 

 tenability of the received doctrines, when I had to do with 

 the transmutationists ; and stood up for the possibility of 

 transmutation among the orthodox — thereby, no doubt, 

 increasing an already current, but quite undeserved, re- 

 putation for needless combativeness.' 2 And yet all along 

 there was alive in him 'a sort of pious conviction that 

 Evolution, after all, would turn out true \ 3 And the kind 

 of evolution he imagined was, so far as we are able to 

 judge, a conception which would arise in the mind of 

 one who studied and compared animal structures with 

 the eye and brain of the artist or engineer rather than 

 of the naturalist. At the age of twenty-six, only seven 

 years before the appearance of the Darwin-Wallace essay, 

 we find him writing to W. S. Macleay, ' I am every day 

 becoming more and more certain that you were on the 

 right track thirty years ago in your views of the order 

 and symmetry to be traced in the true natural system.' 1 

 Macleay's views of the grouping of the animal kingdom 

 are about as regular and symmetrical as the figures 

 seen in a kaleidoscope. Such a conception of sharply 

 separated mathematically grouped forms would naturally 

 lead to the idea of evolution by abrupt steps, whereby 

 a new form would appear from the sudden transformation 

 of the old, just as a chemical compound changes when 

 one element in it is replaced by another — the metaphor 

 employed by Huxley in his letter to Lyell, already 

 referred to on p. 195. 



The evidence at our disposal leads to the belief that 

 this was the state of Huxley's opinion when, towards the 

 end of November, 1859, he read the Origin. The book 

 is planned so as precisely to meet his two-fold difficulty. 

 In place of insufficient evidence in favour of evolution, he 

 here met with convincing and weighty proofs ; and these 



1 Life and Letters ofC. Darwin, vol. ii, p. 188. 2 Ibid. p. 196. 



:i Ibid. p. 190. * Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley, vol. i, p. 92. 



