Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/799

Rh apostle of the Christian Church. And so of ourselves. If we do not consider ourselves bound to hold that an actual serpent was selected as the most persuasive advocate of evil—if we are disposed to think that there is all the air, and all the most obvious characteristics, of allegory in such words as the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"—if we do not accept it as a literal fact that the rotation of the earth was suspended to keep the valley of Ajalon above the horizon for a longer time than was due to the season of the year, then we are equally bound to distrust the truth of the migration of Abraham, and of the sojourn in Egypt, and of the conquest of Palestine, and of the Babylonish captivity, and of the stream of prophecy pointing to some great Deliverer not for the Jews only but for all peoples—and of the life and death and teaching of our Lord. The whole argument, I confess, appears to me to be not only illogical, but irrational.

This is a subject, however, of vast extent on which we have no right or reason to expect any special light or guidance from Prof. Huxley. Even if he approached it in the careful and cautious spirit in which he has generally dealt with his own noble science of biology, it would not follow that he could deal with it as well. We know the confession which Darwin has made of the effect upon his own powerful mind of exclusive devotion to one class of ideas and to one purely physical pursuit, in rendering him comparatively insensible to the whole class of conceptions which are the warp and woof of the higher branches of philosophy. Even in this article, Prof. Huxley tells us that when he tries to follow those who walk delicately among "types" he soon "loses his way." This is a strange confession to make when even in his own special science "type" is one of the most familiar of all words, and when the suggestions connected with it—for example, on the general development of the vertebrate skeleton—are confessedly of the most profound and far-reaching interest. It is still more strange when he himself—walking so delicately as to be most difficult to follow—has tried his hand at the definition of a "type." It is, he says, a "plan of modification of animal form." He tells us he has "a passion for clearness." Is the above definition perfectly pellucid? All animal form is in itself a "plan." Each modification, we now hear, is another "plan." Is this what he means? And if so, what does he mean by a "plan "? Does he mean what all other men mean by the word—some mental conception with a view to the future? Or does he mean only some accidental pattern such as a drop of water may leave when it splashes on a window-pane? Then, what does he mean by a "modification"? Does he mean some wonderful adaptation to