44 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 



book had been nearly thirty years in everybody's hands, and 

 that it brings home to any reader of ordinary intelligence a 

 great principle and a great fact, — the principle that the past 

 must be explained by the present, unless good cause be shown 

 to the contrary ; and the fact that so far as our knowledge of 

 the past history of life on our globe goes, no such cause can be 

 shown, — I cannot but believe that Lyell, for others, as for my- 

 self, was the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. 

 For consistent uniformitarianism postulates Evolution as much 

 in the organic as in the inorganic world. The origin of a new 

 species by other than ordinary agencies would be a vastly 

 greater ' catastrophe ' than any of those which Lyell successfully 

 eliminated from sober geological speculation" (pp. 189-90). 



Darwin attached great importance to the opinions of 

 Lyell, Hooker and Huxley as regards his theory. After 

 making a deep impression upon Lyell (who afterwards 

 proclaimed himself a Darwinian, though with important 

 reservations), and completely converting Hooker, he 

 writes: "If lean convert Huxley I shall be content" 

 (Darwin's Life, ii, p. 221). And he subsequently had 

 good cause for more than usual contentment, as Huxley's 

 vigorous championship of the new views, when these 

 were ignorantly or fanatically attacked, brought them 

 into great prominence and compelled that careful attention 

 on the part of competent authorities without which their 

 progress might have been indefinitely delayed. 



Huxley, however, was no unreasoning partizan, and, 

 while accepting the Darwinian theory as a good working 

 hypothesis, realized the difficulties involved and made 

 no secret of them. In the Preface (dated April 7, 

 1893) to the second volume of his Collected Essays, he 

 remarks : — 



" Those who take the trouble to read the first two essays 

 [i.e. ' The Darwinian Hypothesis,' and ' The Origin of 

 Species') published in 1859 ^nd i860, will, I think, do me 

 the justice to admit that my zeal to secure fair-play for Mr. 



