I02 Thomas Henry Huxley 



" I imagine that most of mj' contemporaries who thought 

 seriously about the matter were very nmch iu my own state 

 of mind — inclined to say to Mosaists and Evolutionists, ' a 

 plague on both your houses ! ' and disposed to turn aside 

 from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion to 

 labour in the fertile fields of ascertainable fact. And I may, 

 therefore, further suppose that the publication of the Darwin 

 and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the Origin 

 in 1859, had the effect upon them of that of a flash of light 

 which, to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly 

 reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or 

 not, certainly goes his way. That whichwe were looking Jor 

 and could not find, was a hypothesis respecting the origin of 

 known organic forms, which assumed the operation of no 

 causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work. 

 We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other specula- 

 tion, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which, 

 could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity 

 tested. The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis 

 we sought. Moreover, it did us the immense service of freeing 

 us for ever from the dilemma — refuse to accept the creation ^ 

 hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted 

 by any cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had no answer ready, 

 and I do not think that anyone else had. A year later, we 

 reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed by such 

 an enquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself master 

 of the central idea of the Origin was, ' how exceedingly 

 stupid not to have thought of that.' I suppose that Columbus's 

 companions said much the same when he made the egg to stand 

 on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, 

 of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough ; but none 

 of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species 

 problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled 

 the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the Origin guided the 

 benighted. 



" Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion, as applied to the organic world, took in Darwin's hands, 

 would prove to be final or not, was, to me, a matter of indifier- 

 ence. In my earliest criticisms of the Origin I ventured to 

 point out that its logical foundation was insecure so long as 



