William Turner Thiselton-Dyer

“ Though Huxley had accepted the Darwinian theory as a working hypothesis, he never succeeded in firmly grasping it in detail. He thought “evolution might conceivably have taken place without the development of groups possessing the characters of species” (Essays, v. 41) . His palaeontological researches ultimately led him to dispense with Darwin. In 1892 he wrote: “The doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a generalization of certain facts . ”

“ Huxley definitely uses the word “evolution,” and admits its existence within the great groups. He had not, however, rid himself of the notion that the archetype was a property inherent in the group. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance he made in 1852, was unable to convert him to evolution in its widest sense (Life, i. 168) . He could not bring himself to acceptance of the theory—owing, no doubt, to his rooted aversion from à priori reasoning—without a mechanical conception of its mode of operation. ”

“ Nor can it be assumed that the descending scale of evolution will reproduce the ascent, or that man will ever be conscious of his doom.
As has been said, Huxley never thoroughly grasped the Darwinian principle. He thought “transmutation may take place without transition” (Life, i. 173) . In other words, that evolution is accomplished by leaps and not by the accumulation of small variations. He recognized the “struggle for existence” but not the gradual adjustment of the organism to its environment which is implied in “natural selection.” ”

“ The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the ‘liberal’ popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible for their failure to remain so ”

“ He quotes with approval Darwin’s remark that “no one has a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many” (Essays, ii. 283) . The rigorous proof which Huxley demanded was the production of species sterile to one another by selective breeding (Life, i. 193) . But this was a misconception of the question. Sterility is a physiological character, and the specific differences which the theory undertook to account for are morphological; there is no necessary nexus between the two. ”

“ The credibility of miracles with Huxley is a question of evidence. It may be remarked that a scientific explanation is destructive of the supernatural character of a miracle, and that the demand for evidence may be so framed as to preclude the credibility of any historical event. Throughout his life theology had a strong attraction, not without elements of repulsion, for Huxley. ”

“ But the solution of the problem of organic evolution must work upwards from the initial stages, and it is precisely for the study of these that “species-work” is necessary. Darwin, by observing the peculiarities in the distribution of the plants which he had collected in the Galapagos, was started on the path that led to his theory. Anatomical research had only so far led to transcendental hypothesis, though in Huxley’s hands it had cleared the decks of that lumber. ”

“ George Bentham had neither a school nor a college education, but early acquired the power of giving sustained and concentrated attention to any subject that occupied him—one essential condition of the success he attained as perhaps the greatest systematic botanist of the 19th century. ”

“ Baron Cuvier (1769–1832) , whose classification still held its ground, had divided the animal kingdom into four great embranchements. Each of these corresponded to an independent archetype, of which the “idea” had existed in the mind of the Creator. There was no other connexion between these classes, and the “ideas” which animated them were, as far as one can see, arbitrary. Cuvier’s groups, without their theoretical basis, were accepted by K. E. von Baer (1792–1876) . The “idea” of the group, or archetype, admitted of endless variation within it ”

“ It is the secret of the superiority of the best theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they substantially recognize these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. ”

“ The mode in which George Bentham was attracted to the botanical studies which became the occupation of his life is noteworthy; it was through the applicability to them of the logical methods which he had imbibed from his uncle’s writings, and not from any special attraction to natural history pursuits. While studying at Angoulême a copy of A. P. de Candolle’s Flore française fell into his hands and he was struck with the analytical tables for identifying plants. ”

“ In 1872 the School of Mines was moved to South Kensington, and Huxley had, for the first time after eighteen years, those appliances for teaching beyond the lecture room, which to the lasting injury of the interests of biological science in Great Britain had been withheld from him by the short-sightedness of government. Huxley had only been able to bring his influence to bear upon his pupils by oral teaching, and had had no opportunity by personal intercourse in the laboratory of forming a school. ”

“ For consistent uniformitarianism postulates evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world” (l.c.) ; and Huxley found in Darwin what he had failed to find in Lamarck, an intelligible hypothesis good enough as a working basis. Yet with the transparent candour which was characteristic of him, he never to the end of his life concealed the fact that he thought it wanting in rigorous proof. Darwin, however, was a naturalist; Huxley was not. He says: “I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species-work was always a burden to me ”

“ That it is, as has been said, immoral is really meaningless. Pain and suffering are affections which imply a complex nervous organization, and we are not justified in projecting them into nature external to ourselves. Darwin and A. R. Wallace disagreed with Huxley in seeing rather the joyous than the suffering side of nature. ”

“ Huxley would have none of either. Imbued with the methods of von Baer and Johannes Müller, his methods were purely inductive. He would not hazard any statement beyond what the facts revealed. He retained, however, as has been done by his successors, the use of archetypes, though they no longer represented fundamental “ideas” but generalizations of the essential points of structure common to the individuals of each class. He had not wholly freed himself, however, from archetypal trammels. “The doctrine,” he says, “that every natural group is organized after a definite archetype . ”

“ This was actually inconsistent with known facts, and was effectually refuted by Huxley in various papers and lectures, summed up in 1863 in Man’s Place in Nature. This “monkey damnification” of mankind was too much even for the “veracity” of Carlyle, who is said to have never forgiven it. Huxley had not the smallest respect for authority as a basis for belief, scientific or otherwise. He held that scientific men were morally bound “to try all things and hold fast to that which is good” (Life, ii. 161) . ”

“ That is an article of exclusive human manufacture” (Life, ii. 268) . The cosmic process Huxley identified with evil, and the ethical process with good; the two are in necessary conflict. “The reality at the bottom of the doctrine of original sin” is the “innate tendency to self-assertion” inherited by man from the cosmic order (Essays, ix. 27) . “The actions we call sinful are part and parcel of the struggle for existence” (Life, ii. 282) . ”

“ There are few parts of the world upon the botany of which he did not touch. In the sequence and arrangement of the great families of flowering plants, different views from those of Bentham may be adopted. But Bentham paved the way by an intimate and exact statement of the structural facts and their accurate relationship, which is not likely to be improved. In method and style, in descriptive work, Bentham was a supreme master. ”

“ He made war on the scholastic methods which wearied the mind in merely taxing the memory; the children were to be prepared to take their place worthily in the community. Physical training was the basis; domestic economy, at any rate for girls, was insisted upon, and for all some development of the aesthetic sense by means of drawing and singing. ”

“ All animals higher than these have been termed Coelomata; they possess a distinct body-cavity in addition to the stomach. Huxley went further than this, and the most profound suggestion in his paper is the comparison of the two layers with those which appear in the germ of the higher animals. The consequences which have flowed from this prophetic generalization of the ectoderm and endoderm are familiar to every student of evolution. ”

“ The government, in 1857, sanctioned a scheme for the preparation of a series of Floras or descriptions in the English language of the indigenous plants of British colonies and possessions. Bentham began with the Flora Hongkongensis in 1861, which was the first comprehensive work on any part of the little-known flora of China. ”

“ Owen could not face the wrath of fashionable orthodoxy. In his Rede Lecture he endeavoured to save the position by asserting that man was clearly marked off from all other animals by the anatomical structure of his brain. ”