“Like a good Catholic who has received extreme unction, I can now sing Nunc Dimittis.  I should have been more than contented with one quarter of what you have said.  Exactly fifteen months ago, when I first put pen to paper for this volume, I had awful misgivings, and thought perhaps I had deluded myself, like so many have done; and I then fixed in my mind three judges, on whose decision I determined mentally to abide.  The judges were Lyell, Hooker, and yourself.  It was this which made me so excessively anxious for your verdict.  I am now contented, and can sing my Nunc Dimittis.”

The effect of the new theory on Huxley’s mind has been expressed most fully and clearly by himself: 

“I imagine that most of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter were very much in my own state of mind—­inclined to say to Mosaists and Evolutionists, ’a plague on both your houses!’ and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion to labour in the fertile fields of ascertainable fact.  And I may, therefore, further suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the Origin in 1859, had the effect upon them of that of a flash of light which, to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way.  That which we were looking for and could not find, was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms, which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work.  We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested.  The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought.  Moreover, it did us the immense service of freeing us for ever from the dilemma—­refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner?  In 1857 I had no answer ready, and I do not think that anyone else had.  A year later, we reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed by such an enquiry.  My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the Origin was, ’how exceedingly stupid not to have thought of that.’  I suppose that Columbus’s companions said much the same when he made the egg to stand on end.  The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the Origin guided the benighted.

      “Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of evolution,
     as applied to the organic world, took in Darwin’s hands, would