at Darwin's last week they (all four of them) ran a tilt against
species; further I believe, than they are prepared to go." Another
quotation from Huxley's essay on _The Reception of the Origin of
Species_ will make it plain beyond all doubt that he was not a
Darwinian before Darwin.

[Illustration: SIR JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER]

"Thus, looking hack into the past, it seems to me that my own
position of critical expectancy was just and reasonable, and must
have been taken up, on the same grounds, by many other persons.
If Agassiz had told me that the forms of life which had
successively tenanted the globe were the incarnations of
successive thoughts of the Deity; and that He had wiped out one
set of these embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe
as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found myself
not only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the
facts of palaeontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was
founded, but I had to confess my want of means of testing the
correctness of his explanation of them. And besides that, I could
by no means see what the explanation explained. Neither did it
help me to be told by an eminent anatomist that species had
succeeded one another in time, in virtue of a 'continuously
operative creational law'. That seemed to me to be no more than
saying that species had succeeded one another in the form of a
vote-catching resolution, with 'law' to please the man of science
and 'creational' to draw the orthodox. So I took refuge in that
_thaetige Skepsis_ which Goethe has so well defined; and,
reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I
usually defended the tenability of the received doctrines when I
had to do with the transmutationists, and stood up for the
possibility of transmutation among the orthodox--thereby, no
doubt, increasing an already current, but quite undeserved,
reputation for needless combativeness."

What transformed Huxley's views and the views of his contemporaries
who accepted Darwinism was not so much the evidence in favour of
evolution contained in the _Origin_, as the illuminating doctrine of
natural selection which for the first time supplied naturalists with a
reasonable explanation of how evolution might have come about, both in
the animal and vegetable kingdoms. As soon as this rea