breadth from the course which it was my right and my duty to pursue; and
yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long I came to a tall
and formidable looking fence. Confident as I might be in the existence
of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood the thorny
barrier with its comminatory notice-board--'NO THOROUGHFARE. By order.
MOSES.' There seemed no way over; nor did the prospect of creeping
round, as I saw some do attract me.... The only alternatives were either
to give up my journey--which I was not minded to do--or to break the
fence down and go through it."

Huxley found that this Mosaic fence, as erected by dogmatic theologians
and scholasticists, was but a flimsy structure at best, and one that was
easily overthrown and destroyed.

Dogmatic theology teaches that man was created from the dust of the
earth, and that he at once fell heir to an estate of physical and
psychical habitudes which were God-like in character; scientific
investigation, on the contrary, demonstrated the fact that man's
inception begins in bathybian protoplasm and culminates, as far as his
general physical organism is concerned, in the last link of an
evolutionary chain that reaches back and back, through countless eons of
ages, to the very beginnings of life.

The History of Life written upon the rocky frame-work of this gray and
hoary old world, declares that man's physical being is but the result of
the laws of evolution. He did not spring into being, like the sea-born
Venus, a creature of physical grace, and strength, and beauty; nor did
the sacred flame of an inborn intelligence at once illumine his
countenance. For thousands of years, the forbears of the present
civilized _homo sapiens_ were but slightly above the _Alalus_ (ape-like
man) of Haeckel in point of personal pulchritude; and for thousands of
years, the ancestors of the civilized man of to-day were savages, with
all the psychical traits of primitive peoples.

Social ethics are as much the result of evolutionary growth as is man
himself. Civilization, which is but another name for ethical culture,
is the outcome of the inherited experiences of thousands of years. These
experiences were the results of law, and that law can be embraced in one
comprehensive word--evolution.

Now, one of the most noticeable facts in biological history is the
tendency that animal structures or organisms, under certain
circumstances, have toward atavism or reversion