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. 1 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 theory 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 



