MODERN EVOLUTION. 



215 



acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and 

 distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue 

 by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious preju- 

 dice. 



Perhaps the best comment on a piece of what is 

 now ancient history is to quote the admissions made 

 by Lord Salisbury — a rigid High Churchman — in 

 his presidential address' to the British Association in 

 this same city of Oxford in 1894 — 



Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by 

 differences far exceeding those that distinguish what we know 

 as species have yet descended from common ancestors. . . . 

 Darwin has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of 

 the immutability of species. 



Few, also, are now found to doubt not only that 

 doctrine, but also the doctrine that all life-forms 

 have a common origin; plants and animals being 

 alike built-up of matter which is identical in char- 

 acter. This doctrine, to-day a commonplace of bi- 

 ology, was, thirty years ago, rank heresy, since it 

 seemed to reduce the soul of man to the level of his 

 biliary duct. Hence the Oxford storm was but a 

 capful of wind compared with that which raged 

 round Huxley's lecture on The Physical Basis of 

 Life delivered, thus aggravating the offence, on a 

 "Sabbath" evening in Edinburgh in 1868. People 

 had settled down, with more or less vague under- 

 standing of the matter, into quiescent acceptance of 

 Darwinism. And now their somnolence was rudely 

 shaken by this Southron troubler of Israel, with his 

 production of a bottle of solution of smelling salts, 



