Introduction to Palaeontology 63 



Vestiges of Creation. Chambers attacked the theological 

 view that all animals and plants had been created at 

 the beginning of the world, and maintained that geo- 

 logical evidence showed the occurrence of a progressive 

 development of animal life. Huxlej^, like all zoologists 

 and geologists who knew anything of the occurrence 

 of fossils in the rocks of past ages, agreed with the 

 general truth of the conception that a progressive de- 

 velopment had occurred which showed that the species 

 now existing were represented in the oldest rocks by 

 species now extinct. But the examples he brought for- 

 ward were all limited to evolution within the great 

 groups, and did not aflfect his idea that archetypes were 

 fixed and did not pass into each other. Moreover, he 

 summed up strongly against the suggestion that there 

 was any parallel between the succession of life in the 

 past and the forms assumed by modern animals in their 

 embryological development. So far as the present 

 writer is able to judge from study of the literature of 

 this period, the possibility of evolution was present in 

 an active form in the minds of Huxley and of his con- 

 temporaries, and in an extraordinary wa}' they brought 

 together evidence which afterwards became of firstrate 

 importance ; but the idea in its modern sense was re- 

 jected by them. 



In 1854 Huxley's uncomfortable period of probation 

 came to an end. Edward Forbes, who held the posts of 

 Palaeontologist to the Geological Survey, and Lecturer 

 on General Natural History at the Metropolitan School 

 of Science Applied to Mining and the Arts, vacated 

 these on his appointment to the Chair of Natural His- 

 tory in the University of Edinburgh, and Sir H. De La 

 Beche, the then Director- General of the Geological 

 Survey, offered both the posts to Huxley — who in June 



