Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/59

 56 "intelligentsia" declared it to be without the slightest element of truth. The public in general, and especially the church, clung to the old, valueless doctrine of a multitude of special creations by an omnipotent deity, apparently forgetting that the greatest of the church fathers, Aquinas and Augustine, had been prominent evolutionists in their day. There arose about Darwin's theories a storm of argument that lasted for many years, and involved scientists, theologians, philosophers, and laymen thorughoutthroughout [sic] the world.

Darwin, although an excellent and self-confident scientist, was modest, retiring, and greatly hampered by ill-health contracted during his "Beagle" voyage. He was forced to leave the work of publicly defending his theories to other men, the most noted of whom was Thomas Henry Huxley, the "Bull dog of Evolution." Huxley was an accomplished scientist, a powerful speaker, and one of the finest of European writers of science for the every-day man. He wrote, taught, and lectured in defense of the evolution theory; after a long, hard day at the university, he would spend the evening lecturing before crowds of workingmen from London's factories, telling them how one species came from another, and how a single-celled creature developed into a complex animal with hundreds of millions of cells in its body, at the same time reconstructing during its growth the entire evolutionary history of its kind. It was largely because of the lectures and magazine articles of this tireless scientist, who believed in the truth of