2i6 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



and a pinch or two of other ingredients, which repre- 

 sented the elementary substances entering into the 

 composition of every living thing from a jelly-speck 

 to man. Well might the removal of the stopper to 

 that bottle take their 'breath away! Microscopists, 

 philosophers " so-called," and clerics alike raised the 

 cry of " gross materialism," never pausing to read 

 Huxley's anticipatory answer to the baseless charge, 

 an answer repeated again and again in his writings, 

 as in the essay on Descartes's Discourse touching 

 the method of using one's reason rightly, and in his 

 Hume. In season and out of season he never wearies 

 in insisting that there is nothing in the doctrine in- 

 consistent with the purest idealism. "All the phe- 

 nomena of Nature are, in their ultimate analysis, 

 known to us only as facts of consciousness." The 

 cyclone thus raised travelled westward on the heels 

 of Tyndall, when in 1874 he asserted the funda- 

 mental identity of the organic and inorganic; dash- 

 ing, as his Celtic blood stirred him, the statements 

 with a touch of poetry in the famous phrase that 

 " the genius of Newton was potential in the fires of 

 the sun." 



The ancient belief in " spontaneous generation," 

 which Redi's experiments upset, was the subject of 

 Huxley's Presidential Address to the British Asso- 

 ciation in 1870. But while he showed how subse- 

 quent investigation confirmed the doctrine of Abio- 

 genesis, or the non-production of living from dead 

 matter, he made this statement in support of Tyn- 



