454 Canadian Record of Science. 



enemy of science, and consequently of human welfare. 

 The follies and hypocrisies which have assumed the name 

 of Christianity, albeit the extreme opposites of the reli- 

 gion of Jesus of Nazareth, have alienated from it some of 

 the best and most honest minds. Huxley's straightforward 

 and vigorous thrusts against what he believed to be shams 

 and fallacies, were, after all, not meant for honest and 

 upright believers so much as for the Pharisees who as- 

 sumed their garb, and were far less harmful than the 

 blunders of the unwise or the misstatements of those 

 who are " wolves in sheep's clothing." His controversial 

 writings, like most others of that class, will not survive 

 the special crises to which they belong. His clear and 

 attractive delineations of natural facts, processes and 

 relations, cannot be surpassed, and form the basis of his 

 permanent reputation. Agnostic though he called him- 

 self, he was one of the divinely-gifted prophets of nature 

 to whom is given more than to other mortals to penetrate 

 and explain the plans of the All-wise in the structure of 

 the world. 



As Huxley was so largely the apostle of evolution, it 

 may be well to refer to his position in that connection. 

 He knew well that the word is one liable to much abuse, 

 and that a modal evolution or development should not be 

 confounded with a causal evolution, which is nothing 

 unless founded on well ascertained proximate and ulti- 

 mate causes. The first is merely a mode of development ; 

 the second leads back to origins. Yet in the loose popular 

 writings of the day they are often identified and inter- 

 changed. The perception of this made him more cautious 

 than many of his contemporaries in his statement of the 

 great problem. The processes by which, from an appar- 

 ently homogeneous egg, all the parts of a complex animal 

 are derived, is an evolution, and fulfils precisely the con- 

 ditions of Spencer's definition of that process. But it 



