MODERN EVOLUTION. 



209 



the mutability, as against the old theory of the fixity, 

 of species. 



In the chapter On the Reception of the Origin 

 of Species, which Huxley contributed to Darwin's 

 Life and Letters, he gives an interesting account of 

 his attitude toward that burning question. He 

 says 



" I think that I must have read the Vestiges (see 

 p. 119) before I left England in 1846, but if I did 

 the book made very little impression upon me, and 

 I was not brought into serious contact with the 

 ' species ' question until after 1850. At that time I 

 had long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony 

 which had been impressed upon my childish under- 

 standing as Divine truth with all the authority of 

 parents and instructors, and from which it had cost 

 me many a struggle to get free. But my mind was 

 unbiassed in respect of any doctrine which presented 

 itself if it professed to be based on purely philo- 

 sophical and scientific reasoning. ... I had not then 

 and I have not now the smallest a priori objection to 

 raise to the account of the creation of animals and 

 plants given in Paradise Lost, in which Milton so 

 vividly embodies the natural sense of Genesis. Far 

 be it from me to say that it is untrue because it 

 is impossible. I confine myself to what must be 

 regarded as a modest and reasonable request for 

 some particle of evidence that the existing species of 

 animals and plants did originate in that way as a 



