296 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xvii 



It has been my fate to receive a good deal more vilipending 

 than (I hope) I deserve. If my colleagues, with whom I have 

 worked so long, put too high a value upon my services, perhaps 

 the result may be not far off justice. — Yours very faithfully, 



T. H. Huxley. 



In addition to the directly controversial articles in the 

 early part of the year, two other articles on controversial 

 subjects belong to 1891. " Hasisadra's Adventure," pub- 

 lished in the Nineteenth Century for June, completed his 

 long-contemplated examination of the Flood myth. In this 

 he first discussed the Babylonian form of the legend re- 

 corded upon the clay tablets of Assurbanipal — a simpler and 

 less exaggerated form as befits an earlier version, and in its 

 physical details keeping much nearer to the bounds of prob- 

 ability. 



The greater part of the article, however, is devoted to a 

 wider question — How far does geological and geographical 

 evidence bear witness to the consequences which must have 

 ensued from a universal flood, or even from one limited to 

 the countries of Mesopotamia? And he comes to the con- 

 clusion that these very countries have been singularly free 

 from any great changes of the kind for long geological 

 periods. 



The sarcastic references in this article to those singular 

 reasoners who take the possibility of an occurrence to be 

 the same as scientific testimony to the fact of its occurrence, 

 lead up, more or less, to the subject of an essay, " Possi- 

 bilities and Impossibilities," which appeared in the Agnostic 

 Annual for 1892, actually published in October 1891, and 

 to be found in Collected Essays, v. 192. 



This was a restatement of the fundamental principles of 

 the agnostic position, arising out of the controversies of the 

 last two years upon the demonology of the New Testament. 

 The miraculous is not to be denied as impossible ; as Hume 

 said, " Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly con- 

 ceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved 

 false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning 

 a priori," and these combinations of phenomena are per- 

 fectly conceivable. Moreover, in the progress of knowl- 



