HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF EVOLUTION THEORY 29 
collect in the germ cells. This was supposed to account for the fact 
that from the germ cell will develop an organism like the parent in 
various details. Ifa part of the body was modified through func- 
tioning or through changed environment, it would have modified 
gemmules, which, in turn, would go to the germ cells and carry over 
the modification to the next generation. This theory was not satis- 
factory even to Darwin and is now only of historical interest. 
Spencer is best known in the history of the evolution theory as an 
ardent neo-Lamarckian. He states his belief as follows: “Change of 
function produces change of structure; it is a tenable hypothesis that 
changes of structure so produced are inherited.’”’ This idea prevailed 
until it was cast down by Weismann. 
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), one of the keenest, most analyti- 
cal thinkers of the nineteenth century, not only defended the general 
doctrine of evolution against Bishop Wilberforce and his aids, but was 
an able investigator in the fields of comparative anatomy and embry- 
ology. ‘At the British Association at Oxford in 1860,” says Judd, 
‘“‘after an American professor had indignantly asked ‘Are we a 
fortuitous concourse of atoms?’ as a comment on Darwin’s views, 
Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, ended a clever but 
flippant attack on the Origin by enquiring of Huxley, who was present 
as Darwin’s champion, if it ‘was through his grandfather or his grand- 
mother that he claimed his descent from a monkey ?’ 
“Huxley made the famous and well-deserved retort: ‘I asserted— 
and I repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an 
ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should 
feel ashamed of recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless 
and versatile intellect—who not content with success in his own sphere 
of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real 
acquaintance, only to obscure them by aimless rhetoric, and distract 
the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent 
digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice!’ 
“Huxley himself accepted the theory of Natural Selection—but 
not without some important reservations—these, however, did not 
prevent him from becoming its most ardent and successful champion. 
Darwin used to acknowledge Huxley’s great service to him in under- 
taking the defense of the theory—a defense which his own hatred of 
controversy and state of health made him unwilling to undertake— 
by laughingly calling him ‘my general agent’ while Huxley himself in 
replying to the critics, declared he was ‘Darwin’s bulldog.’”’ 
