Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 24

[The "Origin" appeared in November. As soon as he had read it, Huxley wrote the following letter to Darwin (already published in "Life of Darwin" volume 2 page 231):--

Jermyn Street W., November 23, 1859.

My dear Darwin,

I finished your book yesterday, a lucky examination having furnished me with a few hours of continuous leisure.

Since I read Von Baer's essays, nine years ago, no work on Natural History Science I have met with has made so great an impression upon me, and I do most heartily thank you for the great store of new views you have given me. Nothing, I think, can be better than the tone of the book--it impresses those who know about the subject. As for your doctrine, I am prepared to go to the stake, if requisite, in support of Chapter 9 [The Imperfection of the Geological Record], and most parts of Chapters 10 [The Geological Succession of Organic Beings], 11, 12 [Geographical Distribution], and Chapter 13 [Cla.s.sification, Morphology, Embryology, and Rudimentary Organs] contains much that is most admirable, but on one or two points I enter a caveat until I can see further into all sides of the question.

As to the first four chapters [Chapter 1, Variation under Domestication; 2, Variation under Nature; 3, The Struggle for Existence; 4, Operation of Natural Selection; 5, Laws of Variation], I agree thoroughly and fully with all the principles laid down in them. I think you have demonstrated a true cause for the production of species, and have thrown the onus probandi, that species did not arise in the way you suppose, on your adversaries.

But I feel that I have not yet by any means fully realised the bearings of those most remarkable and original Chapters--III, IV, and V, and I will write no more about them just now.

The only objections that have occurred to me are--1st, That you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum so unreservedly; and 2nd, It is not clear to me why, if continual physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose, variation should occur at all.

However, I must read the book two or three times more before I presume to begin picking holes.

I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation which, unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you. Depend upon it, you have earned the lasting grat.i.tude of all thoughtful men. And as to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that some of your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead.

I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.

Looking back over my letter, it really expresses so feebly all I think about you and your n.o.ble book, that I am half-ashamed of it; but you will understand that, like the parrot in the story, "I think the more."

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[A month later, fortune put into his hands the opportunity of striking a vigorous and telling blow for the newly-published book. Never was windfall more eagerly accepted. A short account of this lucky chance was written by him for the Darwin "Life" (volume 1 page 255).]

The "Origin" was sent to Mr. Lucas, one of the staff of the "Times"

writers at that day, in what was I suppose the ordinary course of business. Mr. Lucas, though an excellent journalist, and at a later period, editor of "Once a Week," was as innocent of any knowledge of science as a babe, and be wailed himself to an acquaintance on having to deal with such a book. Whereupon, he was recommended to ask me to get him out of his difficulty, and he applied to me accordingly, explaining, however, that it would be necessary for him formally to adopt anything I might be disposed to write, by prefacing it with two or three paragraphs of his own.

I was too anxious to seize upon the opportunity thus offered of giving the book a fair chance with the mult.i.tudinous readers of the "Times," to make any difficulty about conditions; and being then very full of the subject, I wrote the article faster, I think, than I ever wrote anything in my life, and sent it to Mr. Lucas, who duly prefixed his opening sentences.

When the article appeared, there was much speculation as to its authors.h.i.+p. The secret leaked out in time, as all secrets will, but not by my aid; and then I used to derive a good deal of innocent amus.e.m.e.nt from the vehement a.s.sertions of some of my more acute friends, that they knew it was mine from the first paragraph!

As the "Times" some years since, referred to my connection with the review, I suppose there will be no breach of confidence in the publication of this little history, if you think it worth the s.p.a.ce it will occupy.

[The article appeared on December 26. Only Hooker was admitted into the secret. In an undated note Huxley writes to him:--]

I have written the other review you wot of, and have handed it over to my friend to deal as he likes with it...Darwin will laugh over a letter that I sent him this morning with a vignette of the Jermyn Street "pet"

ready to fight his battle, and the "judicious Hooker" holding the bottle.

[And on December 31 he writes again:--]

Jermyn Street, December 31, 1859.

My dear Hooker,

I have not the least objection to my share in the "Times" article being known, only I should not like to have anything stated on my authority.

The fact is, that the first quarter of the first column (down to "what is a species," etc.) is not mine, but belongs to the man who is the official reviewer for the "Times" (my "Temporal" G.o.dfather I might call him).

The rest is my ipsissima verba, and I only wonder that it turns out as well as it does--for I wrote it faster than ever I wrote anything in my life. The last column nearly as fast as my wife could read the sheets.

But I was thoroughly in the humour and full of the subject. Of course as a scientific review the thing is worth nothing, but I earnestly hope it may have made some of the educated mob, who derive their ideas from the "Times," reflect. And whatever they do, they SHALL respect Darwin.

Pray give my kindest regards and best wishes for the New Year to Mrs.

Hooker, and tell her that if she, of her own natural sagacity and knowledge of the naughtiness of my heart, affirms that I wrote the article, I shall not contradict her--but that for reasons of state--I must not be supposed to say anything. I am pretty certain the Sat.u.r.day article was not written by Owen. On internal grounds, because no word in it exceeds an inch in length; on external, from what Cook said to me.

The article is weak enough and one-sided enough, but looking at the various forces in action, I think Cook has fully redeemed his promise to me.

I went down to Sir P. Egerton on Tuesday--was ill when I started, got worse and had to come back on Thursday. I am all adrift now, but I couldn't stand being in the house any longer. I wish I had been born an an-hepatous foetus.

All sorts of good wishes to you, and may you and I and Tyndalides, and one or two more bricks, be in as good fighting order in 1861 as in 1860.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[Speaking of this period and the half-dozen preceding years, in his 1894 preface to "Man's Place in Nature" he says:--]

Among the many problems which came under my consideration, the position of the human species in zoological cla.s.sification was one of the most serious. Indeed, at that time it was a burning question in the sense that those who touched it were almost certain to burn their fingers severely. It was not so very long since my kind friend, Sir William Lawrence, one of the ablest men whom I have known, had been well-nigh ostracised for his book "On Man," which now might be read in a Sunday school without surprising anybody; it was only a few years since the electors to the chair of Natural History in a famous northern university had refused to invite a very distinguished man to occupy it because he advocated the doctrine of the diversity of species of mankind, or what was called "polygeny." Even among those who considered man from the point of view, not of vulgar prejudice, but of science, opinions lay poles asunder. Linnaeus had taken one view, Cuvier another; and among my senior contemporaries, men like Lyell, regarded by many as revolutionaries of the deepest dye, were strongly opposed to anything which tended to break down the barrier between man and the rest of the animal world.

My own mind was by no means definitely made up about this matter when, in the year 1857, a paper was read before the Linnean Society "On the Characters, Principles of Division and Primary Groups of the Cla.s.s Mammalia," in which certain anatomical features of the brain were said to be "peculiar to the genus 'h.o.m.o,'" and were made the chief ground for separating that genus from all other mammals and placing him in a division, "Archencephala," apart from, and superior to, all the rest. As these statements did not agree with the opinions I had formed, I set to work to reinvestigate the subject; and soon satisfied myself that the structures in question were not peculiar to Man, but were shared by him with all the higher and many of the lower apes. I embarked in no public discussion of these matters, but my attention being thus drawn to them, I studied the whole question of the structural relations of Man to the next lower existing forms, with much care. And, of course, I embodied my conclusions in my teaching.

Matters were at this point when the "Origin of Species" appeared. The weighty sentence, "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (1st edition page 488), was not only in full harmony with the conclusions at which I had arrived respecting the structural relations of apes and men, but was strongly supported by them. And inasmuch as Development and Vertebrate Anatomy were not among Mr. Darwin's many specialities, it appeared to me that I should not be intruding on the ground he had made his own, if I discussed this part of the general question. In fact, I thought that I might probably serve the cause of Evolution by doing so.

Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things clear to uninstructed people was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind. So, in 1860, I took the Relation of Man to the lower Animals for the subject of the six lectures to working men which it was my duty to deliver. It was also in 1860 that this topic was discussed before a jury of experts at the meeting of the British a.s.sociation at Oxford, and from that time a sort of running fight on the same subject was carried on, until it culminated at the Cambridge Meeting of the a.s.sociation in 1862, by my friend Sir W.

Flower's public demonstration of the existence in the apes of those cerebral characters which had been said to be peculiar to man.

[The famous Oxford Meeting of 1860 was of no small importance in Huxley's career. It was not merely that he helped to save a great cause from being stifled under misrepresentation and ridicule--that he helped to extort for it a fair hearing; it was now that he first made himself known in popular estimation as a dangerous adversary in debate--a personal force in the world of science which could not be neglected.

From this moment he entered the front fighting line in the most exposed quarter of the field.

Most unluckily, no contemporary account of his own exists of the encounter. Indeed, the same cause which prevented his writing home the story of the day's work nearly led to his absence from the scene. It was known that Bishop Wilberforce, whose first cla.s.s in mathematics gave him, in popular estimation, a right to treat on scientific matters, intended to "smash Darwin"; and, Huxley, expecting that the promised debate would be merely an appeal to prejudice in a mixed audience, before which the scientific arguments of the Bishop's opponents would be at the utmost disadvantage, intended to leave Oxford that very morning and join his wife at Hardwicke, near Reading, where she was staying with her sister. But in a letter, quoted below, he tells how, on the Friday afternoon, he chanced to meet Robert chambers, the reputed author of the "Vestiges of Creation," who begged him "not to desert them." Accordingly he postponed his departure; but seeing his wife next morning, had no occasion to write a letter.

Several accounts of the scene are already in existence: one in the "Life of Darwin" (volume 2 page 320), another in the 1892 "Life," page 236 sq.; a third that of "Lyell" (volume 2 page 335), the slight differences between them representing the difference between individual recollections of eye-witnesses. In addition to these I have been fortunate enough to secure further reminiscences from several other eye-witnesses.

Two papers in Section D, of no great importance in themselves, became historical as affording the opponents of Darwin their opportunity of making an attack upon his theory which should tell with the public. The first was on Thursday, June 28. Dr. Daubeny of Oxford made a communication to the Section, "On the final causes of the s.e.xuality of plants, with particular reference to Mr. Darwin's work on the "Origin of Species." (My best thanks are due to Mr. F. Darwin for permission to quote his accounts of the meeting; other citations are from the "Athenaeum" reports of July 14, 1860.) Huxley was called upon to speak by the President, but tried to avoid a discussion, on the ground "that a general audience, in which sentiment would unduly interfere with intellect, was not the public before which such a discussion should be carried on."

This consideration, however, did not stop the discussion; it was continued by Owen. He said he "wished to approach the subject in the spirit of the philosopher," and declared his "conviction that there were facts by which the public could come to some conclusion with regard to the probabilities of the truth of Mr. Darwin's theory." As one of these facts, he stated that the brain of the gorilla "presented more differences, as compared with the brain of man, than it did when compared with the brains of the very lowest and most problematical of the Quadrumana."

Now this was the very point, as said above, upon which Huxley had made special investigations during the last two years, with precisely opposite results, such as, indeed, had been arrived at by previous investigators. Hereupon he replied, giving these a.s.sertions a "direct and unqualified contradiction," and pledging himself to "justify that unusual procedure elsewhere,"--a pledge which was amply fulfilled in the pages of the "Natural History Review" for 1861.

Accordingly it was to him, thus marked out as the champion of the most debatable theory of evolution, that, two days later, the Bishop addressed his sarcasms, only to meet with a withering retort. For on the Friday there was peace; but on the Sat.u.r.day came a yet fiercer battle over the "Origin," which loomed all the larger in the public eye, because it was not merely the contradiction of one anatomist by another, but the open clash between Science and the Church. It was, moreover, not a contest of bare fact or abstract a.s.sertion, but a combat of wit between two individuals, spiced with the personal element which appeals to one of the strongest instincts of every large audience.

It was the merest chance, as I have already said, that Huxley attended the meeting of the section that morning. Dr. Draper of New York was to read a paper on the "Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin." "I can still hear," writes one who was present, "the American accents of Dr. Draper's opening address when he asked 'Air we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?'" However, it was not to hear him, but the eloquence of the Bishop, that the members of the a.s.sociation crowded in such numbers into the Lecture Room of the Museum, that this, the appointed meeting-place of the section, had to be abandoned for the long west room, since cut in two by a part.i.tion for the purposes of the library. It was not term time, nor were the general public admitted; nevertheless the room was crowded to suffocation long before the protagonists appeared on the scene, 700 persons or more managing to find places. The very windows by which the room was lighted down the length of its west side were packed with ladies, whose white handkerchiefs, waving and fluttering in the air at the end of the Bishop's speech, were an unforgettable factor in the acclamation of the crowd.

On the east side between the two doors was the platform. Professor Henslow, the President of the section, took his seat in the centre; upon his right was the Bishop, and beyond him again Dr. Draper; on his extreme left was Mr. Dingle, a clergyman from Lanchester, near Durham, with Sir J. Hooker and Sir J. Lubbock in front of him, and nearer the centre, Professor Beale of King's College, London, and Huxley.

The clergy, who shouted l.u.s.tily for the Bishop, were ma.s.sed in the middle of the room; behind them in the north-west corner a knot of undergraduates (one of these was T.H. Green, who listened but took no part in the cheering) had gathered together beside Professor Brodie, ready to lift their voices, poor minority though they were, for the opposite party. Close to them stood one of the few men among the audience already in Holy orders, who joined in--and indeed led--the cheers for the Darwinians.