A STL/DENT'S REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY. 



39 



into a narrower specialist as time goes on. It appears to me 

 that the only defence against this tendency to the degeneration 

 of scientific workers lies in the organization and extension of 

 scientific education in such a manner as to secure breadth of 

 culture without superficiality." 



What Haeckel did for evolution in Germany, Huxley did in 

 England. As the earliest and most ardent supporter of Darwin 

 and the theory of descent, it is remarkable that he never gave 

 an unreserved support to the theory of natural selection as all- 

 sufficient. Twenty-five years ago, with his usual penetration 

 and prophetic insight, he showed that the problem of variation 

 might, after all, be the greater problem ; and only three years 

 ago, in his " Romanes Lecture," he disappointed many of the 

 disciples of Darwin by declaring that natural selection failed to 

 explain the origin of our moral and ethical nature. Whether 

 he was right or wrong we will not stop to discuss, but consider 

 the still more remarkable conditions of Huxley's relations to 

 the theory of evolution. As expositor, teacher, defender, he 

 was the high priest of evolution. From the first, he saw the 

 strong and weak points of the special Darwinian theory. He 

 wrote upon the subject for thirty years, and yet he never con- 

 tributed a single original or novel idea to it ; in other words, 

 Huxley added vastly to the demonstration, but never added to 

 the sum of either theory or working hypothesis, and the con- 

 temporary history of the theory proper could be written with- 

 out mentioning his name. This lack of speculation upon the 

 factors of evolution was true throughout his whole life. In the 

 voyage of the " Rattlesnake " he says he did not even think of 

 the species problem. His last utterance regarding the causes of 

 evolution appeared in one of the Reviews as a passing criticism 

 of Weismann's finished philosophy, in which he implies that his 

 own philosophy of the causes of evolution was as far off as 

 ever ; in other words, Huxley never fully made up his mind or 

 committed himself to any causal theory of development. 



Taking the nineteenth century at large, outside of our own 

 circles of biology, Huxley's greatest and most permanent 

 achievement was his victory for free thought. Personally we 

 may not be agnostic ; we may disagree with much that he has 



