TEE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 5°7 



the rude hands of the narrow-minded, yet eager to join the rabble against a 

 new and equally unfriended stranger, as if that were the best way of purchasing 

 immunity for themselves. The public must soon see that if a literal inter- 

 pretation of scripture is an insufficient argument against the true geognostic 

 history of our earth, so also must it be against all associated phenomena, sup- 

 posing they are presented on good evidence. 12 



In view of this situation, the arguments for evolution, in 1844 or 

 1859, were primarily significant, not as direct evidences in favor of one 

 hypothesis, but as touchstones for deciding between the claims of two — 

 the only two — rival hypotheses: that of the ready-made production of 

 species, with their known characteristics and relations, by repeated 

 special acts of creation; and that of their production through the 

 gradual modification, in the course of natural descent, of earlier and 

 simpler forms. Huxley, it is true, refused to face the alternative, and 

 cried, " a plague o' both your houses !" Nothing can be said, however, 

 in justification of such a position on the part of a man of science. 

 Hypotheses non jingo has never been a sound or serviceable maxim; it 

 had certainly not been by following it that the sciences of astronomy 

 and geology had developed. 13 Now, if other hypotheses, beyond the 

 two in question, were conceivable in 1844, certainly no others were 

 seriously advanced. The first concern of a biologist of the period 

 should, then, have been to compare the two hypotheses of the origin of 

 species, in the light of the then known principles and facts, hereafter to 

 be enumerated. This comparison, if made honestly, by a logically com- 

 petent mind, must necessarily have led, at almost any time after 1840, 

 to the conclusion to which Spencer tells us that he found himself forced 

 somewhere about 1850. By this time, he says : 



The belief in organic evolution had taken deep root [in my mind] and 

 drawn to itself a large amount of evidence — evidence not derived from numerous 

 special instances, but derived from the general aspects of organic nature and 

 from the necessity of accepting the hypothesis of evolution when the hypothesis 

 of special creation had been rejected. The special creation belief had dropped 

 out of my mind many years before, and I could not remain in a suspended 

 state; acceptance of the only possible alternative was imperative." 



After these preliminaries, the reader is prepared for viewing the 

 arguments for evolutionism, now to be recalled in a more detailed 

 manner, in their proper historical and logical perspective. 



1. Argument from the General Presumption of Science against 

 " Supernatural " Explanations of Phenomena. — In his " Belfast Ad- 

 dress," 1874, Tyndall pointed out that the main argument for evolu- 



12 Chambers, " Explanations," 1846, p. 120. 



"Huxley later expressed this general truth forcibly enough; e. g., "The 

 Progress of Science," 1S87. " Physical science rests on verified or uncontra- 

 dicted hypotheses; and, such being the case, it is not surprising that a great 

 condition of its progress has been the invention of verifiable hypotheses " 

 ("Method and Results," 1902, pp. 61-62). 



"Duncan, "Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer," 1908, II., 317. 



