8o Thomas Henry Huxley 



same fossils, and to replace it by the word Homotaxial, 

 which meant no more than that the beds occupied cor- 

 responding places in the geological history of the earth. 

 Huxley did not pretend that these arguments were 

 entirel}' original : the}- represented the drift of the best 

 geological opinion, and he seized hold of them and set 

 them down as permanent geological truths. 



In 1869, in a Presidential Address to the Geological 

 Societ}', Huxley took up one of the burning questions 

 of the day. In the early part of the century, the dis- 

 cov^eries of geologists had been the occasion of great 

 distress to those good people who clung to a literal in- 

 terpretation of everything in the Bible. Long before 

 the doctrine of evolution and the descent of man from 

 lower animals had taken practical shape, there had been 

 a battle roval between geologists who declared that the 

 earth was many million years old, and had been in- 

 habited at least by animals and plants for enormous 

 periods, and those who clung to the traditional chro- 

 nology which placed the date of creation onh- a few 

 thousand j^ears from now. The continued progress of 

 geology, and the sturdy championship of it b}' men like 

 Sedgwick, Chalmers, and Buckland, who were at the 

 same time reputable theologians and distinguished 

 men of science, had decided the battle in favour of the 

 conclusions of science, and it was accepted generally 

 that the earth was almost indefinitely old. At the same 

 time, another and more strictly scientific dispute had 

 been in progress. The older school of geologists, look- 

 ing on the face of the world, and seeing it scarred bj- 

 might}' fissures, displaying huge distortions of the beds 

 in the crust, had argued that geological change had 

 taken place by a series of mighty catastrophes. The 

 tremendous results which they saw seemed to them 



