i83o.] MR. HUXLEY'S LECTURE. 4I7 



and spreading the belief in the descent-theory, ever since 

 that grand review in the Times and the battle royal at Ox- 

 ford up to the present day. 



Ever my dear Huxley, 



Yours sincerely and gratefully, 



Charles Darwin. 



P.S. — It was absurdly stupid in me, but I had read the 

 announcement of your Lecture, and thought that you meant 

 the maturity of the subject, until my wife one day remarked, 

 "it is almost twenty-one years since the 'Origin' appeared," 

 and then for the first time the meaning of your words flashed 

 on me ! 



[In the above-mentioned lecture Mr. Huxley made a 

 strong point of the accumulation of palaeontological evidence 

 which the years between 1859 and 1880 have given us in fa- 

 vour of Evolution. On this subject my father wrote (August 

 31, 1880) :] 



My dear Professor Marsh, — I received some time ago 

 your very kind note of July 28th, and yesterday the mag- 

 nificent volume.* I have looked with renewed admiration at 

 the plates, and will soon read the text. Your work on these 

 old birds, and on the many fossil animals of North America 

 has afforded the best support to the theory of Evolution, 

 which has appeared within the last twenty years. f The 

 general appearance of the copy which you have sent me is 



* Odontornithes. A monograph on the extinct Toothed Birds of N. 

 America. 1880. By O. C. Marsh. 



f Mr. Huxley has well pointed out (' Science and Culture,' p. 317) 

 that: "In 1875, the discovery of the toothed birds of the cretaceous for- 

 mation in N. America, by Prof. Marsh, completed the series of transitional 

 forms between birds and reptiles, and removed Mr. Darwin's proposition 

 that, ' many animal forms of life have been utterly lost, through which the 

 early progenitors of birds were formerly connected with the early progeni- 

 tors of the other vertebrate classes,' from the region of hypothesis to that 

 of demonstrable fact." 



