5 o4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



capable of errors upon particular points which were palpable to every 

 competent specialist. 



Yet the layman was, after all, sound in his main thesis; and, what 

 is far more significant, his thesis was based upon sound and sensible 

 arguments, substantially the same arguments that Huxley was destined 

 before long to use in the same cause, though with far superior skill as 

 a debater. It will, I think, appear impossible to acquit the young 

 Huxley of a certain measure of scientific Pharisaism in this episode. 

 He was so shocked by minor breaches of scientific propriety, in the 

 " Vestiges," that he forgot the weightier matters of the law of scientific 

 method. In his irritation at Chambers's incidental slips in zoology, 

 he became blind to the importance and suggestiveness of the general 

 outline of that writer's reasoning. Quite other was Alfred Eussel 

 "Wallace's reaction upon the little book. As early as 1845 he wrote : 



I have rather a more favorable opinion of the " Vestiges " than you appear 

 to have. I do not consider it a hasty generalization, but rather as an ingenious 

 hypothesis, strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but which 

 remains to be proved by more facts and the additional light which more research 

 may throw upon the problem. It furnishes a subject for every observer of 

 nature to attend to; every fact he observes will make either for or against it.' 



By 1847 Wallace had become thoroughly convinced of the truth of 

 transf ormism ; and from that time forward his mind was occupied with 

 the problem of explaining the cause and modus operandi of evolution. 

 At this time, he writes : 



The great problem of the origin of species was already distinctly formulated 

 in my mind. ... I believed the conception of evolution through natural law, 

 so clearly formulated in the " Vestiges," to be, so far as it went, a true one ; 

 and I firmly believed a full and careful study of the facts of nature would 

 ultimately lead to the solution of the mystery. 



Wallace thus escaped the fatal error in logical procedure into which 

 Huxley fell. For Huxley, in the passage already cited, gives as one of 

 his two reasons for refusing to accept, even provisionally, the evolution- 

 ary hypothesis, the fact that "no adequate suggestion respecting the 

 causes of the transmutation assumed" had then been made. But, that no 

 causal explanation of a fact is at hand, is not good reason for denying 

 the fact, if serious evidence of its reality is presented. Wallace properly 

 discriminated the two issues; becoming first convinced that there was 

 an established balance of scientific probability in favor of the fact, he 

 then set himself upon the quest of a hypothesis that would explain it. 

 He verily had his reward; a decade later he appeared, with Darwin, as 

 joint author of the doctrine of natural selection. 



8 Wallace, " My Life," I., 254. Writing sixty years after, Dr. Wallace adds 

 his final judgment of the " Vestiges," " a book which, in my opinion, has always 

 been undervalued, and which, when it first appeared, was almost as much abused, 

 and for much the same reasons, as was Darwin's ' Origin of Species ' fifteen 

 years later " {ibid.). 



