HUXLEY AND NATURAL SELECTION. 127 



express our belief that experiments, conducted by a skilful 

 physiologist, would very probably obtain the desired pro- 

 duction of mutually more or less infertile breeds from a 

 common stock, in a comparatively few years ; but still, as the 

 case stands at present, this * little rift within the lute ' is not 

 to be disguised nor overlooked." 



He concludes with a summary of the results of 

 his arsfument. The sentences which bear on the 



o 



present question are as follows (pp. 77, 78) : — 



" Our object has been attained if we have given an 

 intelligible, however brief, account of the established facts 

 connected with species, and of the relation of the explanation 

 of those facts offered by Mr. Darwin to the theoretical views 

 held by his predecessors and his contemporaries, and, above 

 all, to the requirements of scientific logic. We have ventured 

 to point out that it does not, as yet, satisfy all those require- 

 ments ; but we do not hesitate to assert that it was superior to 

 any preceding or contemporary hypothesis, in the extent of 

 observational and experimental basis on which it rests, in its 

 rigorously scientific method, and in its power of explaining 

 biological phenomena, as was the hypothesis of Copernicus 

 to the speculations of Ptolemy. But the planetary orbits 

 turned out to be not quite circular after all, and, grand as was 

 the service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and Newton 

 had to come after him. What if the orbit of Darwinism 

 should be a little too circular? what if species should offer 

 residual phenomena, here and there, not explicable by natural 

 selection ? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a 

 position to say whether this is, or is not, the case ; but in 

 either event they will owe the author of 'The Origin of 

 Species' an immense debt of gratitude. We should leave a 

 very wrong impression on the reader's mind if we permitted 

 him to suppose that the value of that work depends wholly on 

 the ultimate justification of the theoretical views which it 

 contains. On the contrary, if they were disproved to-morrow, 

 the book would still be the best of its kind — the most com- 



