anthropology. For centuries man excepted himself, save in crude and superficial fashion, from the investigation which for long periods he made into the earth beneath him and to the heavens above him. This tardy inquiry into the history of his own kind and of its place in the order and succession of life, as well as of its relations to the lower animals, is explained by the subjection of the intellect to preconceived theories based on the authority accorded to ancient legends about man. These legends, invested with the sanctity with which time endows tradition, finally became parts of sacred literature. To question this was as superfluous as it was impious. Thus it came to pass that the only being competent to inquire into his own history looked at it through the distorting prism of a mythopeic past. The canon of inquiry had not been closed, because it had never been opened. One example of this will suffice. In his "Memories of My Life" Sir Francis Galton says that "the horizon of the antiquaries was so narrow at the date of his Cambridge days" [he entered Trinity College in 1840] that "the whole history of the early world was literally believed by many of the best informed men to be contained in the Pentateuch. It was also supposed that nothing more of importance could be learned of the origin of civilization during classical times than was to be found definitely stated in classical authors." So persistent was this conviction that when in 1839 M. Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes unearthed from the Somme Valley a number of rudely chipped flints which he contended were the tools and weapons of primitive races, the savants to whom he showed them remained unconvinced for some

years until concurrent evidence to an ancient Stone Age in other parts of the world compelled assent. Strange as it may seem, it was not till 1884 that the British Association for the Advancement of Science accorded anthropology a section to itself. Hitherto it had been allowed access only through the "tradesmen's entrance."

When Darwin published the "Origin of Species" in 1859, he ventured only to hint that man was not specially created. When "The Descent of Man" came out in 1873, he explained that his reticence was due to the wish not to add to the prejudice against his views. He added, "Now the case wears wears a totally different aspect." That it did was thanks to Huxley, as we shall see presently. To quote what he said on the publication of the "Origin of Species," "it marked the Hejira of Science from the idolatries of special creation to the pure faith in evolution."

1859 was annus mirabilis. In addition to the "Origin of Species," there was published Kirchoff and Bunsen's "Spectrum Analysis," with its evidence that the spectroscope had revealed the identity of stuff of which the universe and all that therein is are made. To these followed John Stuart Mill's "Liberty," "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," "Adam Bede," "A Tale of Two Cities," "The Virginians," "Idylls of The King," and Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam. The Victorian age has become a subject for scoff by sciolists and smatterers. It was, as Dean Inge says: "A great century. There were giants in the earth in those days; I have no patience with the pygmies who gird at them."

Of course the "Origin of Species" had a mixed reception. So far as the

larger number of naturalists, and of the intelligent public who followed their lead were concerned, there was an open mind on the question of the mutation of species. There had been a long time of preparation and speculation. We find the key-note of evolution in Heraclitus, and more than two thousand years after his time, Herbert Spencer, above all men, had placed it on a base as broad as the facts that supported it.

But it needed the leaven of the human and personal to stir it into life and touch man in his various interests. When Darwin illustrated the theory of modification of life-forms by familiar examples gathered from his own experiences and observations, and from intercourse with breeders of pigeons, horses, and dogs, this went to men's "business and bosoms," and if the vulgar interpreted Darwin, as some who should know better interpret him even now, as explaining man's descent from a monkey, or how a bear became a whale by taking to swimming, the thoughtful accepted it as a master-key unlocking not the mystery of origins or of causes of variations, which to this day remains a problem, but the mystery of the ceaselessly acting agent which, operating on favorable variations, has brought about myriads of species from simple forms.

On the whole, the attitude of the clergy was hostile. They smelt heresy. Here and there a single voice was raised in qualified sympathy. Canon Tristram and Charles Kingsley showed more than this, but both in the Old and New World the "drum ecclesiastic" was beaten. Cardinal Manning declared Darwinism to be "a brutal philosophy, to wit, there is no God and the Ape is our Adam." Protestant and

Catholic agreed in condemning it as "an attempt to dethrone God," as "a huge imposture," as "tending to produce disbelief in the Bible," to "do away with all idea of God," and as "turning the Creator out of doors." Such are fair samples to be culled from the anthology of invective which was the staple content of nearly every "criticism." But the most notable attack came from Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford, in the "Quarterly Review" of July, 1860. This recalls the memorable duel between the bishop and the biologist at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford of that year. There had been words between Owen and Huxley at that gathering. Owen, who covertly backed the bishop, contended that there were certain fundamental differences between the brains of man and ape. Huxley met this by "direct and unqualified contradiction," and pledged himself to justify that unusual procedure elsewhere. The atmosphere was electric; the bishop was up to time. The vacant place of argument in his speech was filled by declamation, and the declamation became acrid. He finished his harangue by asking Huxley whether he was related on his grandmother's side or his grandfather's side to an ape.

"The Lord hath delivered him into my hands," whispered Huxley to a friend at his side as he rose to reply. And this is what he said. "I asserted and I repeat that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific ques

The reception accorded to the "Origin of Species" by Darwin's scientific contemporaries may be noted. Herbert Spencer was an evolutionist before Darwin. Huxley said he was prepared to go to the stake if needs be in support of the book. Hooker, Bates, and Lubbock were immediate converts. Asa Gray and Lyell made reservations (such as Alfred Russel Wallace made) about accepting the inclusion of the whole man, body, soul, and spirit, as the outcome of natural selection. Agassiz, Murray, and Harvey would have none of the new heresy, neither would Adam Sedgwick, who wrote a long protest to Darwin couched in loving terms and ending in a hope that "we shall meet in Heaven." Owen's attitude at heart was hostile. He inspired the article contributed by Bishop Wilberforce to the "Quarterly Review." "Punch" found in Darwinism material for jokes; so did writers of light verse and squibs. Mr. Courthope made fun of it in his "Paradise of Birds," of which this is a sample:

"Eggs were laid as before, but each

time more and more varieties struggled and bred, Till one end of the scale dropped its ancestor's tail and the other got rid of his head. From the bill, in brief words, were developed the birds, unless our tame pigeons and ducks lie.

From the tail and hind legs, in the second-laid eggs, the apesand Professor Huxley."

Huxley's motto was that of the great Strafford, "Thorough." Darwin hesitated, but Huxley went breast forward. It could be said of him, as was said of Luther in his relation to Erasmus, that he hatched the egg that Darwin laid. Sharpening beak and claws, he opened the campaign in 1860 in a series of lectures to working-men, followed by one to the Philosophic Institute of Edinburgh. These were published in a volume called "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," which appeared in 1863. It pushed Darwin's theory to its logical conclusion in extending the processes of evolution to man, thus including him in a universal order of development whose continuity is unbroken. The gist of what he said is in this quotation from the book:

"In view of the intimate relations between man and the rest of the living world and between the forces exercised by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are coördinated terms of nature's great progression from the formless to the formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will. I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves, and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life."

It was with pride warranted by the results of subsequent researches that Huxley, in a letter to me, thus refers to the book when arranging for its reissue among the "Collected Essays":

"I was looking through 'Man's Place in Nature' the other day. I do not think there is a word I need delete or anything I need add except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down. That is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it would certainly ruin all my prospects."

The friend was Sir William Lawrence, to whom Lord Eldon had refused an injunction to protect the rights of the author on the ground that a book by Sir William, entitled "Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man," controverted the Scriptures. That was in 1819.

The agitation which had been aroused by the lectures which were embodied in "Man's Place in Nature" was but a zephyr breeze when compared with the storm that raged round Huxley's lecture on the "Physical Basis of Life," which, aggravating the offense, was delivered on a "Sabbath" evening in Edinburgh, 1868. In the In the limited degree to which people had thought about it, they had settled down, with more or less vague understanding about it, into acceptance of Darwinism. And now their quiet was rudely shaken by this Southron troubler of Israel, with his production of a bottle of solution of smelling-salts and a pinch or two of other ingredients representing the elementary substances entering into the composition of every living thing from a jelly speck to man. Well might the removal of the stopper of that bottle take their breath away!

Philosophers, so-called, and clerics alike raised the cry of "gross materialism," never pausing to read Huxley's anticipatory answer to the baseless charge an answer repeated again and again in his writings, as in the essay on "Descarte's Discourse of Using One's Reason Rightly," and in his "Hume." In season and out of season he never wearies in insisting that there is nothing in the doctrine inconsistent with the purest idealism. He said that "all the phenomena of nature are in their ultimate analysis known to us only as facts of consciousness." The cyclone thus raised traveled westward on the heels of Tyndall when, at the British Association meeting in Belfast, he emphasized the fundamental identity of the living and the non-living, dashing the statements as his Celtic blood stirred him with a touch of poetry in the famous phrase that "the genius of Newton was potential in the fires of the sun."

Just as the term "free-thinker" retains an opprobrious meaning, so no matter how strongly the charge of materialism may be repudiated, it will continue to be flung by obscurantists against their opponents till the Greek Kalends. They do it to make your flesh creep. None the less, those against whom it is leveled must not tire of repeating that it is of small import whether we call everything matter or everything spirit. Like the farmer debating with his landlord, and quaffing the uninspiring claret, "we get no furrader."

The latest pronouncement of the comparative psychologist agrees with what has been quoted from Huxley. In his "Human Behaviour" Professor Stewart Paton says "we now know that there are no specific differences of

kind, but only those of degree, between the reflex activities of the protozoa and the highest mental processes of man. Assuming its validity, the one conclusion to be drawn from this statement is that man is not immortal, or that, if he is, this must be accorded to the animals who are his ancestors in unbroken descent. Only of the germ plasm, whence each one of us has sprung, can we say that it is eternally young and, relatively, deathless.

Concerning this, to many, the momentous question-the question asked by Job centuries ago, "if a man die, shall he live again?" the dilemma was cogently presented by Cyrano de Bergerac three hundred years ago in his "Voyage to the Moon and Sun." "They (the believers in a future life) maintain that this soul, which can act only imperfectly when it has lost one of its tools in the course of life, can work properly when it has lost them all after death."

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The believers in survival of a soul as special to man have to face the question, At what stage in his evolution from the embryo to the full-grown human was this soul inserted? True to the name which he coined to express his general attitude, Huxley was an agnostic concerning all matters outside human experience. He neither affirmed nor denied. As the term implies, he did not know. He said that agnosticism is not a creed, but a method. Its motto is, "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which, if a man keep whole and unde

filed, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him. To his wholesome nature life was sweet. He had no patience with the sentimental anemics who sing pæans to what they call "Welcome Death." He had his share of bereavements, which brought out the tenderness and sympathy of his nature. In a letter to Lord Morley he says, "The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigour as long as one lives, and death as soon as vigour flags." Then he adds a human note which awakens quick response. "It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal." No one insisted more fully on the limitation of our faculties; none more deeply on the mystery which environs us. The known is a narrow fringe round the unknown. We talk glibly of evolution, but we are ignorant as to its cause. Apparently we are as far as ever from any solution of the origin, nature, and, if there be any, of the meaning of life. In brief, of origins we know nothing; of processes we catch only glimmerings; although in this matter more light is slowly coming. As a wise man has said, "Because science is sure of nothing, it is always advancing."

Reference to the more important of Huxley's utterances would be incomplete if these did not include a few words about his lecture "On the Coming of Age of the Origin of Species," which was delivered at the Royal Institution on April 9, 1880. It is printed in the second volume of the "Collected Essays." The occasion was memorable.

Among the many privileges that have been mine was that of hearing the