I.

HUXLEY AND TYNDALL ON EVOLUTION.

THE FORTY-SIXTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN THE MEIONAON OCT. 2, 1876.

"NONE of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are, therefore, unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules, or the identity of their properties, to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. The quality of each molecule gives it the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent." - PROFESSOR CLERK MAXWELL, "Lecture delivered before the British Association at Bradford," in Nature, vol. viii. p. 441.

"THERE is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution. The teleological and the mechanical views of Nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The teleologist can always defy the evolutionist to disprove that the primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe." - PROFESSOR T. H. HUXLEY in The Academy for October, 1869, No. 1, p. 13.

BIOLOGY.

I.

HUXLEY AND TYNDALL ON EVOLUTION.

IN 1868 Professor Huxley, in an elaborate paper in the Microscopical Journal, announced his belief that the gelatinous substance found in the ooze of the beds of the deep seas is a sheet of living matter extending around the globe. The stickiness of the deep-sea mud, he maintained, is due to innumerable lumps of a transparent, jelly-like substance, each lump consisting of granules, coccoliths, and foreign bodies, embedded in a transparent, colorless, and structureless matrix. It was his serious claim that these granule-heaps, and the transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded, represent masses of protoplasm.

1. To this amazingly strategic and haughtily trumpeted substance found at the lowest bottoms of the oceans Huxley gave the scientific name Bathybius, from two Greek words meaning deep

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and sea, and assumed that it was in the past, and would be in the future, the progenitor of all the life on the planet. Bathybius," was his language, "is a vast sheet of living matter enveloping the whole earth beneath the seas.”

2. No less a man than David Friedrich Strauss, who, in 1872, wrote "The Old Faith and New," his last work, used Bathybius as a presumably triumphant keystone of the physiological portion of his argument against the belief in the supernatural (The Old Faith and New, sect. 48). This deep-sea ooze he made the bridge between the inorganic and the organic. "At least two miracles or revelations," wrote Jean Paul Richter, face to face with the French Revolution," remain for you uncontested in this age, which deadens sound with unreverberating materials. They resemble an Old and a New Testament, and are these, the birth of finite being and the birth of life within the hard wood of matter. In one inexplicable every other is involved, and one miracle annihilates a whole philosophy" (Levana, sect. 38). It is very noteworthy, that, according to Strauss's own final admission in 1872, miracle must be confessed to have occurred once at least at the introduction of life, unless some method of filling up the chasm between the dead and the living forms of matter can be found. Bathybius was to occupy this gap. "Huxley," wrote Strauss, "has discovered the Bathybius, a shining heap of jelly on the seabottom; Häckel, what he has called the Moneres, structureless clots of an albuminous carbon, which,