124 Thomas Henry Huxley 



In fact, so far as it concerned the great independent 

 t}'pes which he believed to exist among animals, he 

 was more than prepared for it. Let us take a single 

 definite example of his position. In his work on the 

 Medusas, he had shewn how a large number of creat- 

 ures, at first sight diverse, were really modifications 

 of a single great type, and he used language which, 

 now that all zoologists accept evolution in the fullest 

 way, requires no change to be understood : 



"What has now beeu advanced will, perhaps, be deemed 

 evidence sufficient to demonstrate, — first, that the organs of 

 these various families are traceable back to the same point in 

 the way of development ; or, secondly, when this cannot be 

 done, that they are connected by natural gradations with or- 

 gans which are so traceable ; in which case, according to the 

 principles advanced in 57, the various organs are homologous, 

 and the families have a real affinity to one another and should 

 form one group. ... It appears, then, that these five fam- 

 ilies are by no means so distinct as has hitherto beeu supposed, 

 but that they are members of one great group, organised upon 

 one simple and uniform plan, and, even in their most complex 

 and aberrant forms, reducible to the same type. And I may 

 add, finally, that on this theory it is by no means difficult to 

 account for the remarkable forms presented by the Medusae in 

 their young state. The Medusre are the most perfect, the 

 most individualised animals of the series, and it is only in 

 accordance with what very generally obtains in the animal 

 kingdom, if, in their early condition, they approximate towards 

 the simplest forms of the group to which they belong." 



Such words, written before 1849, only differ from 

 those that would have been written by a convinced 

 evolutionist by a hair's breadth. But Huxley was not 

 an evolutionist then : it was Darwin's work, contain- 

 ing a new exposition of evolution and the new principle 

 of natural .selection, that convinced him, not of natural 

 selection but of evolution. At Oxford, in i860, it was 



