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Professor Huxley's Darwinism. 
[February, 
“ Such a case would imply that one form had remained 
for a very long period unaltered, whilst its descendants had 
undergone a vast amount of change ; and the principle of 
competition between organism and organism, between child 
and parent, will render this a very rare event ” (pp. 265, 266) ; 
‘‘they will, during each successive age, have to be slightly 
modified so as to hold their places in relation to slight 
changes in the conditions” (p. 308). “When any of the 
inhabitants of any area have become modified and improved, 
we can understand on the principle of competition, and from 
the all-important relation of organism to organism in the 
struggle for life, that any which did not become modified and 
improved would be liable to extermination” (pp. 291, 292). 
And that Prof. Huxley, as a Darwinian, would have wel- 
comed with more composure the absence of such persistence, 
may be inferred from the fadt that he speaks of the existence 
of these types as a “ circumstance to be wondered at” (“ Lay 
Sermons,” p. 219). This was in 1862, when “ observation 
and experiment upon the existing forms of life ” was “ the 
only way in which it [progressive modification] can be de- 
monstrated ” (p. 226). In the following year, when lecturing 
to working men, Prof. Huxley pronounced the circumstance 
“ something stupendous.” 
Supposing persistence explicable by Darwinism, how is 
the supremacy of that theory thereby established ? That 
earlier speculators may have considered progress a necessary 
contingent no more damages the pith of their view of modi- 
fication than the circumstance that Mr. Darwin restridted 
the mode of adtion of natural seledtion will cause the gene- 
ral theory of seledtion to be annihilated should the restric- 
tions imposed by him prove to have been unwarranted, — a 
question beyond the scope of this article. 
It is singular that once upon a time Prof. Huxley, if I 
understand him aright, insisted that — viewed from another 
standpoint — persistent types furnish not neutral, but, by dis- 
crediting catastrophic and periodic-creation theories, very 
favourable evidence of evolution. Had all Prof. Huxley’s 
evolutionary writings been inspired by the moral wisdom of 
the brief paper of June, 1859,* he would never have earned 
* It is possible that Prof. Huxley was here advocating the view that the 
entire modern fauna and flora have persisted from a remote geological epoch, 
but that, owing to “ the imperfection of the geological record,” only a few 
forms are known to have done so. The important passages are given in the 
“ Historical Sketch ” of the “ Origin of Species ” ; in addition to which is the 
concluding sentence, which runs as follows : — “ In faCt, palasontology and 
physical geology are in perfedt harmony, and coincide in indicating that all we 
know of the conditions in our world, during geological time, is but the last 
