and proceeded to make his famous retort. (The "Athenaeum" reports him as
saying that Darwin's theory was an explanation of phenomena in Natural
History, as the undulatory theory was of the phenomena of light. No one
objected to that theory because an undulation of light had never been
arrested and measured. Darwin's theory was an explanation of facts, and
his book was full of new facts, all bearing on his theory. Without
asserting that every part of that theory had been confirmed, he
maintained that it was the best explanation of the origin of species
which had yet been offered. With regard to the psychological distinction
between men and animals, man himself was once a monad--a mere atom, and
nobody could say at what moment in the history of his development he
became consciously intelligent. The question was not so much one of a
transmutation or transition of species, as of the production of forms
which became permanent.

Thus the short-legged sheep of America was not produced gradually, but
originated in the birth of an original parent of the whole stock, which
had been kept up by a rigid system of artificial selection.)

On this (continues the writer in "Macmillan's Magazine") Mr. Huxley
slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern and pale,
very quiet and very grave ("Young, cool, quiet, scientific--scientific
in fact and in treatment."--J.R. Green. A certain piquancy must have
been added to the situation by the superficial resemblance in feature
between the two men, so different in temperament and expression. Indeed
next day at Hardwicke, a friend came up to Mr. Fanning and asked who his
guest was, saying, "Surely it is the son of the Bishop of Oxford."), he
stood before us and spoke those tremendous words--words which no one
seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were
spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no