“... my zeal to secure fair play for Mr. Darwin, did not drive me into the position of a mere advocate; and that, while doing justice to the greatness of the argument, I did not fail to indicate its weak points. I have never seen any reason for departing from the position which I took up in these two essays; and the assertion which I sometimes meet with nowadays, that I have ‘recanted’ or changed my opinions about Mr. Darwin’s views, is quite unintelligible to me.”
“As I have said in the seventh essay, [see pages [131, 132] of the present volume] the fact of evolution is to my mind sufficiently evidenced by palæontology; and I remain of the opinion expressed in the second, that until selective breeding is definitely proved to give rise to varieties infertile with one another, the logical foundation of the theory of natural selection is incomplete.”
It is therefore clear, as I have before stated, that Huxley, in 1893, re-stated his criticisms and qualifications of thirty years before, and expressed his conviction anew of the validity of the objections which he then raised against a full and complete acceptance of natural selection.
We now come to the last and most significant of all Huxley’s utterances on evolution and natural selection, made on two great occasions in the last year of his life. Lord Salisbury, in his eloquent and interesting Presidential Address to the British Association at Oxford (August 8th, 1894), had said of Darwin:—
“He has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species.... Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by differences far exceeding those that distinguish what we know as species have yet descended from common ancestors.”
While thus completely admitting evolution in the organic world, Lord Salisbury attacked natural selection on two grounds—first, on the insufficiency of the time allowed by physicists for a process which is, of necessity, extremely slow in its operation; secondly, on the ground that “we cannot demonstrate the process of natural selection in detail; we cannot even, with more or less ease, imagine it.” And his main objection under this head was the supposed difficulty in securing the union of successful variations. The actual words have been already quoted on [page 83], where it was shown that the criticism does not apply to natural selection, but to a theory mistaken by the speaker for that of Darwin. Curiously enough, the first objection of the insufficiency of time was the indirect cause of a subsequent trenchant criticism by Professor Perry of the line of mathematical reasoning on which the limit had been fixed.
Huxley was called on to second the vote of thanks, and his speech had evidently been considered with the greatest care. I quote the passages which bear on evolution and natural selection from the Times of August 9th, 1894, in which a verbatim report is furnished:—
“... As one of those persons who for many years past had made a pretty free use of the comfortable word ‘evolution,’ let him remind them that 34 years ago a considerable discussion, to which the President had referred, took place in one of their sectional meetings upon what people frequently called the ‘Darwinism question,’ but which on that occasion was not the Darwinism question, but the very much deeper question which lay beneath the Darwinism question—he meant the question of evolution.... The two doctrines, the two main points, for which these men [Sir John Lubbock, Sir J. Hooker, and the speaker] fought were that species were mutable, and that the great variety of animal forms had proceeded from gradual and natural modification of the comparatively few primitive forms....”
After alluding to the revolution in thought which had taken place in thirty-four years, he said:—
“As he noted in the presidential address to which they had just listened with such well-deserved interest, he found it stated on that which was then and at this time the highest authority for them, that as a matter of fact the doctrine of the immutability of species was disposed of and gone. He found that few were now found to doubt that animals separated by differences far exceeding those which they knew as species were yet descended from a common ancestry. Those were their propositions; those were the fundamental principles of the doctrine of evolution. Darwinism was not evolution, nor Spencerism, nor Hæckelism, nor Weismannism, but all these were built on the fundamental doctrine which was evolution, which they maintained so many years, and which was that upon which their President had put the seal of his authority that evening....”