86 Thomas Henry Huxley 



worth while to recall that the keenness of Huxlej-'s 

 language was not directed against Sir William Thom- 

 son, between whom and Huxley there was no more 

 than the desire to argue out an interesting scientific 

 question upon which their conclusions differed, but be- 

 tween Huxley and those outsiders who were always 

 ready to turn any dubious question in science into an 

 argument discrediting the general conclusions of 

 science. 



The last time that Huxlej' occupied the Presidential 

 Chair of the Geological Societ\' was in 1870, and he 

 occupied his Presidential address by a review of the 

 " old judgments " which he had given in the course of 

 his first address in 1862. The address was entitled 

 " Palaeontology and Evolution," and the most im- 

 portant part of it was a complete withdrawal of the 

 fears he had expressed that geology would not supply 

 definite evidence of the transformation of species. Im- 

 portant discoveries had come thick and fast ; and, at 

 least in the case of the higher vertebrates, he declared 

 that, however one might " sift and criticise them," 

 they left a clear balance in favour of the doctrine of the 

 evolution of living forms one from another. But, with 

 his usual critical spirit, examining arguments that bore 

 against a conclusion for which he hoped almost more 

 stringently than arguments apparentlj^ favourable to 

 what he expected to be true, Huxley made an im- 

 portant distinction, the value of which becomes more 

 and more apparent as time goes on. In the first flush 

 of enthusiasm for Darwinism, zoologists and palaeon- 

 tologists allowed their zeal to outrun discretion in the 

 formation of family trees. They examined large series 

 of living or extinct creatures, and so soon as they found 

 gradations of structure present, the}^ arranged their 



