N-ATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY 25 1 



identical with that of Huxley, who says that the same influence 

 which led him to put as little faith in the current speculations on 

 this subject as in the venerable traditions recorded in the first 

 two chapters of Genesis, was perhaps by a curious irony of fate 

 more potent than any other in keeping alive a sort of pious con- 

 viction that the transmutation of species, after all, would turn out 

 true. 



He says, too, that most of his contemporaries who thought 

 seriously about the matter were very much in his own state of 

 mind, inclined to say to both creationists and evolutionists, " A plague 

 on both your houses ! " and disposed to turn aside from an intermi- 

 nable and fruitless discussion to labor in the fertile fields of ascer- 

 tainable fact. 



The publication of the work of Darwin and Wallace had, he 

 tells us, the effect of " a flash of light, which to a man who has 

 lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether 

 it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way." 



"That which we were looking for and could not find, was a 

 hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms, which 

 assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved 

 to be actually at work." 



The " Origin " provided us with the working hypothesis we 

 sought. . . . My reflection, when I first made myself master of 

 the central idea . . . was. How extremely stupid not to have 

 thought of that ! . . . the facts of variability, of the struggle 

 for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough ; 

 but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the 

 species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace 

 dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the ' Origin ' guided 

 the benighted." 



Clear and strong as was the light which fell on natural history 

 with the discovery of the full significance of the fierce and un- 

 ceasing struggle for existence which springs from the geometrical 

 multiplication of organisms, the "beacon-fire of the 'Origin'" 

 shone with no less penetration on the basis of the argument of 

 Ray and Paley and the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises ; for 

 it revealed the unbroken chain of natural causation which binds 

 up, with the adaptations which Paley makes use of, those that 



