A. a. Hunt — A Vindication of Bacon, Huxley, and others. 



strong ; e.g., " As for government by professors only, the fact of 

 their being specialists is against them .... unfortunately, 

 there is among them, as in other professions, a fair sprinkling of 

 one-idea'd fanatics, ignorant of the commonest conventions of official 

 relation, and content with nothing if they cannot get everything 

 their own way " ! (Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 312). 



Kelvin v. Huxley. 



In an address to the Victoria Institute in 1897 Lord Kelvin, 

 referring to an observation of Huxley in 1869 regarding the age 

 of the Earth — viz., " Most of us are, I expect, Gallios who care for 

 none of these things, being of opinion that, true or fictitious, they 

 have made no practical difference to the earth during the period of 

 which a record is preserved in stratified deposits," — suggested that 

 Huxley's indifference was due to his ignorance that there was valid 

 foundation for estimates worth considering as to absolute magnitudes. 

 But Lord Kelvin entirely ignored Huxley's reply in 1876, when he 

 pointed out that should Lord Kelvin tell him his geological authority 

 was quite wrong, his answer would be, "That is not my affair; 

 settle that with the geologist, and when you have come to au 

 agreement among yourselves I will accept your conclusion " (Coll. 

 Essays, vol. iv, p. 135). No man could say more than this. 



Kelvin V. Darwin. 



Lord Kelvin quotes from Jukes' " Students' Manual " as follows : 

 "Mr. Darwin, in his admirably reasoned book on the origin of 

 species . . . estimates the time required for the denudation 

 of the rocks of the Weald of Kent . . . at three Jiundred 

 millions of years" (Trans. Yict. Inst., vol. xxxi, p. 12). 



This Lord Kelvin thinks very foolish, but so did Darwin ; for in 

 1866 he writes to Professor Charles Pritchard, F.E.S. : " That is 

 a very foolish episode of mine about the Wealden, and was struck 

 out in the later editions " (Life of Professor Pritchard, p. 94). 



Not only was the passage quoted by Lord Kelvin struck out, viz., 

 "In all probability a far longer period than 300,000,000 years has 

 elapsed since the latter part of the Secondary period," but the whole 

 two pages which referred to the Wealden were rejected. 



Kelvin V. Lyell. 



" Led by Hutton & Playfair, Lyell taught the doctrine of eternity 

 and uniformity in geology" (loc. cit., p. 16). 



Lord Kelvin here again entirely ignores Huxley's refutation in 

 1876, twenty-one years before the old charge was furbished up 

 again, viz., " It is clear that the consistent working out of the 

 uniformitarian idea might lead to the conception of the eternitj' of 

 the world. Not that 1 mean to say that either Hutton or Lyell held 

 this conception — assuredly not ; they would have been the first to 

 repudiate it" (Coll. Ess., vol. iv, p. 52). 



Then listen to Lyell himself. " It cannot be denied that our 

 failure to detect signs of them [the vertebrata] in older strata, in 

 proportion to the rank of their organization, favours the doctrine 



