Febbuaby 21, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



255 



bourne, and after a long illness (' complica- 

 tion following influenza ' *) died there on 

 the 29th of June, 1895. 



Such were the principal episodes in the 

 life of Huxley. Many more details may be 

 found in the numerous periodicals of the 

 day and in some of them are depicted 

 various phases of his character and labors. 

 The short time that is at our disposal to- 

 night may be most profitably and enter- 

 tainingly utilized in reviewing his feats as 

 a warrior of science and estimating the 

 measure of influence he exercised in divert- 

 ing human thought from the ruts in which it 

 had moved for centuries and directing it 

 into a highway where increasing light from 

 different sides could guide the wayfarer. 

 Although this period of warfare was at its 

 height not farther back than the early after- 

 noon of the present century, and some of 

 us here assembled joined in the fray, to the 

 younger naturalists it is an unknown past 

 except through history, and to some of us 

 who were of it, it is so strange as to recur 

 to us rather as a dream than as a realized 

 passage in actual life. 



II. 



Doubtless man, almost from the moment 

 of his acquisition of those characters which 

 distinguish him as representative of the 

 genus Homo, had wondered and speculated 

 as to how he came into being and how the 

 animals assembled round him had sprung 

 into existence. Those early concepts must 

 have been strange indeed, but were doubt-- 

 less transmitted from mother to child, only 

 with some eccentricities lopped ofi" with ad- 

 vancing intelligence. Gradually, among 

 peoples of the Aryan stock at least, they crys- 

 tallized into a doctrine that in the begin- 

 ning there was chaos, that the three elements 

 of air, water and earth were diflerentiated, 

 and that animals were successively created 

 to occupy the spaces. Such were the 



* Lancet, July 6, p. 64, 65. 



views of the old oriental cosmologists and 

 such of the later Romans as epitomized in 

 Ovid's verse. These ideas were long regnant 

 and naturalists embodied some in their 

 schemes, most accepting the idea that ani- 

 mals may have been created in pairs, but a 

 few (such as Agassiz) urging that they must 

 have been created in communities approxi- 

 mating to those still found. There were 

 very few to dissent from these views of 

 specific creation, and those few had little 

 influence on the popular beliefs. But as 

 the present century advanced, curious men 

 delved into all the mysteries of nature; the 

 sciences of morphology, physiology, his- 

 tology, embryology, geology and zooge- 

 ography came into being, and facts were 

 marshalled from every side that militated 

 against the old conceptions. Even when 

 these sciences were inchoate, or new born, 

 sagacious men had perceived the drift of 

 the facts and anticipated induction by the 

 formulation of hypotheses of evolution, but 

 the hypotheses were too crude to ensure ac- 

 ceptance. Meanwhile, however, the facts 

 accumulated, and in 1859 a factor determin- 

 ing the course of development of species was 

 appreciated by Darwin and Wallace, and 

 soon applied to a wide range of facts in the 

 former's ' Origin of Species by means of 

 Natural Selection.' 



Darwin's work at once aroused great pop- 

 ular interest, but it was too diffuse and the 

 intellectual pabulum it contained was too 

 strong and indigestible for ordinary readers, 

 and it is probable that the general acceptance 

 of the Darwinian form of evolution would 

 have been delayed much longer than it was 

 had it not been for the excursions from the 

 scientific fold into the popular arena by one 

 having the confidence of the former and the 

 ear of the latter, as did Huxley. 



Scarcely had Darwin's work come from 

 the press when Huxley commenced his mis- 

 sionary work. Almost exceptional among 

 numerous reviews, remarkable chiefly for 



