344 A Century of Science 



Furthermore, of " this amazingly strategic [! !] and 

 haughtily trumpeted substance . . . Huxley as- 

 sumed that it was in the past, and would be in the 

 future, the progenitor of all the life on the planet." 

 Now it is not true that, in the paper referred to, 

 Huxley announces any such belief or makes any 

 such assumption as is here ascribed to him ; but we 

 shall see, in a moment, that Mr. Cook's system of 

 quotation is peculiar in enabling him to extract 

 from the text of an author any meaning whatever 

 that may happen to suit his purposes. This ingen- 

 ious garbling enables the lecturer to come in with 

 telling effect at the close of his third lecture, and 

 earn an ignoble round of applause by holding up 

 the current number of the " American Journal of 

 Science and Arts ''(which he would appear to have 

 picked up at a bookstall on his way to the lecture 

 room) and citing from it, as the fifty-first and clos- 

 ing " concession " of evolutionists, " that bathybius 

 has been discovered in 1875, by the ship Challenger, 

 to be hear, O heavens ! and give ear, O earth ! 

 sulphate of lime ; and that when dissolved it crys- 

 tallizes as gypsum. [Applause.] " This is what 

 Mr. Cook calls striking, with the " latest scientific 

 intelligence," at the " bottom stem " of the great 

 tree of evolution. The "latest scientific intelli- 

 gence," with him, means the last book or article 



