646 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
ban of exclusion ought, he thinks, to fall upon the theory 
of evolution. 
I now freely offer myself for judgment before the 
tribunal whose law is here laid down. First and foremost, 
then, I have never advocated the introduction of the 
theory of evolution into our schools. I should even be 
disposed to resist its introduction before its meaning had 
been better understood and its utility more fully recog- 
nized than it is now by the great body of the community. 
The theory ought, I think, to bide its time until the 
free conflict of discovery, argument, and opinion has 
won for it this recognition. A necessary condition 
here, however, is that free discussion should not be 
prevented, either by the ferocity of reviewers or the arm 
of the law; otherwise, as I said before, the work of 
social preparation cannot go on. On this count, then, 
I claim acquittal, being for the moment on the side of 
Virchow. 
Besides the duties of the chair, which I have been privi- 
leged to occupy in London for more than a quarter of a 
century, and which never involved a word on my part, pro 
or con, in reference to the theorv of evolution, I have had 
the honor of addressing audiences in Liverpool, Belfast, 
and Birmingham; and in these addresses the theory of 
evolution, and the connected doctrine of spontaneous gen- 
eration, have been more or less touched upon. Let us 
now examine whether in my references I have departed 
from the views of Virchow or not. 
in the. Liverpool discourse, after speaking of the theory 
of evolution when applied to the primitive condition of 
matter, as belonging to " the dim twilight of conjecture/' 
and affirming that " the certainty of experimental inquiry 
is here shut out," I sketch the nebular theory as enun- 
ciated by Kant and Laplace, and afterward proceed thus: 
" Accepting some such view of the construction of our 
system as probable, a desire immediately arises to connect 
the present life of our planet with the past. We wish to 
know something of our remotest ancestry. On its first 
detachment from the sun, life, as we understand it, could 
not have been present on the earth. How, then, did it 
come there? The thing to be encouraged here is a reverent 
freedom a freedom preceded by the hard discipline which 
