i8o THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 



The stimulating efFect of Gladstone's article will be 

 gathered from the following extract taken from a letter 

 to Lord Farrer (dated December 6, 1885) : — 



" From a scientific point of view Gladstone's article was un- 

 doubtedly not worth powder and shot. But, on personal grounds, 

 the perusal of it sent me blaspheming about the house with the 

 first healthy expression of wrath known for a couple of years — 

 to my wife's great alarm — and I should have ' busted up ' if I 

 had not given vent to my indignation ; and secondly, all ortho- 

 doxy was gloating over the slap in the face which the G.O.M. 

 had administered to science in the person of Reville" (Life, 

 ii, p. 115). 



Mr. Gladstone's reply — "Proem to Genesis" — ap- 

 peared in the January (1886) number of the Nineteenth 

 Century, and Huxley's rejoinder — " Mr. Gladstone and 

 Genesis " — in that for February (Coll. Essays, iv, p. 164). 

 This is sufficiently scathing, although it was subjected to 

 a good deal of pruning before publication, at the request 

 of the editor. The passage about reptiles, the incon- 

 veniently early geological appearance of which does not 

 harmonize with the "order" in Genesis, is terribly 

 sarcastic : — 



" Still, the wretched creatures stand there, importunately de- 

 manding notice ; and, however different may be the practice in 

 that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses 

 and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really 

 is of no avail whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to 

 bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my 

 experience of the ' Elysian regions of Science,' wherein it is a 

 pleasure to me to think that a man of Mr. Gladstone's intimate 

 knowledge of English life, during the last quarter of a century, 

 believes my philosophic existence to have been rounded off in 

 unbroken equanimity." 



And apropos of the difference between a lecture and a 

 sermon : — 



" I note, incidentally, that Mr. Gladstone appears to consider 



