214 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



and again and again led successful counter-attacks 

 on his discomfited foes. 



Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing in 1825, 

 the seventh son of an assistant schoolmaster ; but 

 his parents came from families located at Coventry 

 and on the Welsh Marches, and Huxley himself had 

 the true fighting temperament of a border race. 

 Huxley tells us that, to the men of science of that 

 generation, the publication of the Origin of Species had 

 the effect upon them of a flash of light in the darkness. 

 " We wanted," he writes, " not to pin our faith to 

 that or any other speculation, 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 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 

 with such an enquiry. My reflection, when I first made 

 myself master of the central idea of the Origin, was, 

 * How extremely stupid not to have thought of that ! ' 



The famous scene between Bishop Wilberforce and 

 Huxley at the Oxford meeting of the British Associa- 

 tion in 1860 has often been described. Wilberforce 

 had obtained a first-class in the Oxford Mathematical 

 Schools in his youth, and therefore, being regarded by 

 his University as a master of all branches of natural 

 knowledge, had been selected to uphold the cause 

 of orthodoxy. The Bishop endeavoured to kill the 



