242 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XIII 



Within the ranks of the biologists, at that time, I met 

 with nobody, except Dr. Grant of University College, 

 who had a word to say for Evolution and his advocacy 

 was not calculated to advance the cause. Outside these 

 ranks, the only person known to me whose knowledge 

 and capacity compelled respect, and who was, at the 

 same time, a thorough-going evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, 

 and then entered into the bonds of a friendship which, 

 I am happy to think, has known no interruption. Many 

 and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. 

 But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness 

 of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic 

 position. I took my stand upon two grounds : Firstly, 

 that up to that time, the evidence in favour of trans- 

 mutation was wholly insufficient ; and secondly, that no 

 suggestion respecting the causes of transmutation assumed, 

 which had been made, was in any way adequate to 

 explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of 

 knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any 

 other conclusion was justifiable. 



In those days I had never even heard of Treviranus' 

 Biologic. However, I had studied Lamarck attentively, 

 and I had read the Vestiges with due care ; but neither 

 of them afforded me any good ground for changing my 

 negative and critical attitude. As for the Vestiges, I 

 confess that the book simply irritated me by the prodigious 

 ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind 

 manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me 

 at all, it set me against Evolution ; and the only review 

 I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground 

 of needless savagery, is one I wrote on the Vestiges while 

 under that influence. . . . 1 



1 See the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, xiii. 

 1854, p. 425, where the tenth edition of "this once attractive and 

 still notorious work of fiction " is unsparingly examined, and its 

 inaccurate statements and misty generalisations laid bare, until 



