How much evidence would you require to believe that there was a time when stones fell upwards, or granite made itself by a spontaneous rearrangement of the elementary particles of clay and sand?  And yet the difficulties in the way of these beliefs are as nothing compared to those which you would have to overcome in believing that complex organic beings made themselves (for that is what creation comes to in scientific language) out of inorganic matter.

I know it will be said that even on the transmutation theory, the first organic being must have made itself.  But there is as much difference between supposing the passage of inorganic matter into an amoeba, e.g., and into an elephant, as there is between supposing that Portland stone might have built itself up into St. Paul’s, and believing that the Giant’s Causeway may have come about by natural causes.

True, one must believe in a beginning somewhere, but science consists in not believing the having reached that beginning before one is forced to do so.

It is wholly impossible to prove that any phenomenon whatsoever is not produced by the interposition of some unknown cause.  But philosophy has prospered exactly as it has disregarded such possibilities, and has endeavoured to resolve every event by ordinary reasoning.

I do not exactly see the force of your argument that we are bound to find fossil forms intermediate between men and monkeys in the Rocks.  Crocodiles are the highest reptiles as men are the highest mammals, but we find nothing intermediate between CROCODILIA and LACERTILIA in the whole range of the Mesozoic rocks.  How do we know that Man is not a persistent type?  And as for implements, at this day, and as, I suppose, for the last two or three thousand years at least, the savages of Australia have made their weapons of nothing but bone and wood.  Why should homo EOCENUS or OOLITICUS, the fellows who waddied the AMPHITHERIUM and speared the PHASCOLOTHERIUM as the Australian niggers treat their congeners, have been more advanced?

I by no means suppose that the transmutation hypothesis is proven or anything like it.  But I view it as a powerful instrument of research.  Follow it out, and it will lead us somewhere; while the other notion is like all the modifications of “final causation,” a barren virgin.

And I would very strongly urge upon you that it is the logical development of Uniformitarianism, and that its adoption would harmonise the spirit of Paleontology with that of Physical Geology.

CHAPTER 1.14.

1859-1860.

[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.