“expressed his belief in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups and in the absence of transitional forms, with all the confidence of youth and imperfect knowledge.  I was not aware at that time that he had been many years brooding over the species question; and the humorous smile which accompanied his gentle answer, that such was not altogether his view, long haunted and puzzled me.”

An elaborate study of Lyell’s works helped largely in destroying this youthful confidence, and a letter written by Lyell and quoted by Huxley in the chapter he communicated to Darwin’s Life and Letters, states that in April, 1856, “when Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston were 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