HUXLEY AND HIS WORK. 763 



equaling that which had gone before, an applause hearty and genuine 

 in its recognition that a strong man had arisen among the biologists of 

 England." 



The versatile bishop indulged in the argumentum ad hominem so 

 very trite and familiar to us all (who has not heard it"?) he would like 

 "to hear from Mr. Huxley whether it was by his grandfather's or 

 grandmother's side that he was related to an ape." 



Huxley replied and answered : " I asserted, and I repeat, that a man 

 would have no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grand- 

 father. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recall- 

 ing it would be a man; a man of restless and versatile intellect who, 

 not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, 

 plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaint- 

 ance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric and distract the atten- 

 tion of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions 

 and skilled appeals to religious prejudice." 



The arguments adduced against evolution during those days were 

 sometimes very comical, and the confident air of the upholder of the 

 ancient views and the assurance with which he claimed that his posi- 

 tion was fixed and that the burden of proof rested entirely upon the 

 advocate of the opposite view were very amusing. It was urged that 

 no one had ever seen one species turn into another. Had anyone ever 

 seen any animal made? Could anyone really conceive of any animal 

 being actually made*? Did an omnipotent Creator actually take the 

 "dust of the ground" and mold it into animal shape and then breathe 

 into its nostrils "the breath of life?" "Did infinitesimal atoms flash 

 into living tissues?" Certainly no physiologist with a competent 

 knowledge of histology could believe in any such mode of creation. 

 On the other hand, everyone that could exercise the necessary skill 

 could follow the evolution of an animal from an undifferentiated proto- 

 plasmic mass into a perfect animal. A clutch of eggs could be succes- 

 sively taken from a mother hen or a hatching oven, and day after day 

 the actual evolution of the undifferentiated matter into derivative 

 functional parts could be followed. That which is true of the hen is 

 true of man, only in the latter case it is more difficult to obtain the 

 requisite material and greater skill to use it is requisite. Compare 

 the embryos developing in the hen and human eggs and at first no dif- 

 ference except size and environment can be perceived. Compare them 

 in successive stages, and adult animals more or less parallel to some 

 early stages may be found still living or entombea in earlier formations 

 of the earth in fossilized form. 



It was argued that no one had ever seen one species turn into 

 another. But is it not a matter of historical evidence that many 

 breeds of domestic animals have actually been developed by the agency 

 of man and propagate their kind? And how are such breeds distin- 

 guished from species except by the fact that we know their origin, and 



