CHAP. IX.] NATURAL SELECTION. 289 



fessor Huxley has replied in his paper on &quot;Mr. Darwin s 

 critics&quot; in the Contemporary Eeview for No- Professor 

 vember 1871. 2&quot; 



In that article Professor Huxley does not so much dispute 

 the truth of the foregoing conclusions concerning the Origin 

 of Species as deny their distinctness from those at which 

 Mr. Darwin himself has arrived, or indeed originally put 

 forth, asserting that my view of Specific Genesis is but &quot; an 

 iteration of the fundamental principle of Darwinism.&quot; 



I may be pardoned then if I shortly endeavour to show more 

 distinctly wherein my view radically differs from that first 

 propounded by Mr. Darwin, and still maintained, or at least 

 not distinctly repudiated by him ; though the admissions he 

 has of late made amount to a virtual, but certainly not to an 

 explicit, abandonment of his theory. 



The Professor expresses his doubt as to the existence of 

 an &quot;absolute and pure Darwinian&quot; a doubt which was 

 certainly surprising, as he had been always understood as 

 guarding himself carefully against the identification of his 

 own views with those of Mr. Darwin, and as allowing that it 

 was one thing to hold the doctrine of evolution and another 

 to accept the Darwinian hypothesis. In a lecture* delivered 

 in 1868 at the Royal Institution, he observed, &quot;I can testify, 

 from personal experience, it is possible to have a complete 

 faith in the general doctrine of evolution, and yet to hesitate 

 in accepting the Nebular, or the Uniformitarian, or the 

 Darwinian hypotheses in all their integrity and fulness.&quot; 



It is plain then that at a recent period Professor Huxley 

 distinguished himself from thorough-going disciples of Mr. 

 Darwin ; implying by this distinction a recognition of the 

 existence of such disciples, pure Darwinians, like those of 

 whom he in his paper ignores the existence. 



The very essence of Mr. Darwin s theory as to the &quot; origin 

 of species&quot; was, the paramount action of the destructive 

 powers of nature over any direct tendency to vary in any 



* See Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vol. v. p. 279. 



U 



