*oo PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



alike built up of matter which is identical in char- 

 acter. This doctrine, to -day a commonplace of 

 biology, was, thirty years ago, rank heresy, since it 

 seemed to reduce the soul of man to the level of his 

 biliary duct. Hence the Oxford storm was but a 

 capful of wind compared with that which raged 

 round Huxley's lecture on The Physical Basis of 

 Life delivered, thus aggravating the offence, on a 

 'Sabbath' evening in Edinburgh in 1868. People 

 had settled down, with more or less vague under- 

 standing of the matter, into quiescent acceptance of 

 Darwinism. And now their somnolence was rudely 

 shaken by this Southron troubler of Israel, with his 

 production of a bottle of solution of smelling salts, 

 and a pinch or two of other ingredients, which 

 represented the elementary substances entering into 

 the composition of every living thing from a jelly- 

 speck to man. Well might the removal of the 

 stopper to that bottle take their breath away! 

 Microscopists, philosophers 'so-called,' and clerics 

 alike raised the cry of * gross materialism,' never 

 pausing to read Huxley's anticipatory answer to the 

 baseless charge, an answer repeated again and again 

 in his writings, as in the essay on Descartes's Dis- 

 course touching the method of using one's reason 

 rightly, and in his Hume. In season and out of 

 season he never wearies in insisting that there is 

 nothing in the doctrine inconsistent with the purest 

 idealism. 'All the phenomena of nature are, in 

 their ultimate analysis, known to us only as facts of 

 consciousness.' The cyclone thus raised travelled 

 westward on the heels of Tyndall, when in 1874 he 

 asserted the fundamental identity of the organic and 



