510 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



working theory, definite, suggestive of precisely formulable problems 

 to which inductive tests could be applied, harmonious with the initial 

 assumptions through which several other disciplines had already been 

 converted from mere masses of information into sciences. Huxley 

 later saw this clearly enough, and expressed it forcibly, though he 

 never seems to have confessed the unreasonableness of his earlier posi- 

 tion. The publication of Lyell's " Principles of Geology " in 1830, 

 wrote Huxley 16 in 1887, " constituted an epoch in the modern history 

 of the doctrine of evolution, by raising in the mind of every intelligent 

 reader this question : If natural causation is competent to account for 

 the not-living part of our globe, why should it not also account for the 

 living part ?" If every intelligent reader had this question in his mind 

 after 1830, it is a little singular that Huxley himself, and almost every 

 other naturalist of the period, saw no importance whatever in the 

 reasonings of Chambers, Spencer, Baden Powell, and a few others, who 

 were the only writers of the time to press the question home. 



2. The Argument from Uniformitarianism in Geology. — Huxley, 

 indeed, from the time of his conversion to Darwin's views, always set 

 great store by the argument from the presumptions of scientific method ; 

 but usually in a more specialized and less philosophical form of it. 

 Geology was, in England, the dominant and the most brilliantly suc- 

 cessful science of the first half of the century; and Lyell had made it 

 a working principle of geological reasoning that past phenomena, not 

 directly open to experiment, were, so far as possible, always to be re- 

 ferred to the operation of " causes " similar to those now at work. 

 "Whether the uniformitarian doctrine was not, as some contemporary 

 geologists hold, a good deal overstrained by Lyell, it does not lie within 

 the purpose of this paper to ask; at all events, the doctrine was ac- 

 cepted by Huxley and most of the men of science of that time. And in 

 uniformitarianism evolutionism seemed to Huxley — after 1858 — to be 

 directly implied. We find him writing Lyell in June, 1859 : 



I by no means believe that the transmutation hypothesis' is proven, or 

 anything like it. But I view it as a powerful instrument of research. Follow 

 it out, and it will lead us somewhere; while the other notion is, like all the 

 other modifications of " final causation," a barren virgin. ... I would very 

 strongly urge upon you that it is the logical development of uniformitarianism. 



In the self-same paper in which we saw Huxley justifying his re- 

 fusal for some twelve years to adopt the doctrine of transformation, 

 even as a working hypothesis, there is also to be found the following 

 passage : 



I have recently read afresh the first edition of the " Principles of Geology " ; 

 and when I consider that for nearly thirty years this remarkable book had been 

 in everybody's hands, and that it brings home to every reader of ordinary intel- 

 ligence a great principle and a great fact — the principle that the past must be 



16 " Method and Results," " The Progress of Science," p. 99. 



