212 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



have thought of that!' I suppose that Columbus's 

 companions said much the same when he made the 

 egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the 

 struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, 

 were notorious enough, but none of us had suspected 

 that the road to the heart of the species problem lay 

 through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled 

 the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the Origin 

 guided the benighted." 



But the disciple soon outstripped the master. 

 As was said of Luther in relation to Erasmus, Hux- 

 ley hatched the egg that Darwin laid. For in the 

 Origin of Species the theory was not pushed to its 

 obvious conclusion: Darwin only hinted that it 

 " would throw much light on the origin of man and 

 his history." His silence, as he candidly tells us in 

 the Introduction to the Descent of Man, was due to 

 a desire " not to add to the prejudices against his 

 views." No such hesitancy kept Huxley silent. In 

 the spirit of Plato's Laws, he followed the argument 

 whithersoever it led. In 1860 he delivered a course 

 of lectures to working-men On the Relations of Man 

 to the Lower Animals, and in 1862, a couple of lec- 

 tures on the same subject at the Edinburgh Philo- 

 sophical Institution. The important and significant 

 feature of these discourses was the demonstration 

 that no cerebral barrier divides man from apes ; that 

 the attempt to draw a psychical distinction between 

 him and the lower animals is futile; and that " even 

 the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin 



