Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/511

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the rude hands of the narrow-minded, yet eager to join the rabble against a new and equally unfriended stranger, as if that were the best way of purchasing immunity for themselves. The public must soon see that if a literal interpretation of scripture is an insufficient argument against the true geognostic history of our earth, so also must it be against all associated phenomena, supposing they are presented on good evidence.

In view of this situation, the arguments for evolution, in 1844 or 1859, were primarily significant, not as direct evidences in favor of one hypothesis, but as touchstones for deciding between the claims of two—the only two—rival hypotheses: that of the ready-made production of species, with their known characteristics and relations, by repeated special acts of creation; and that of their production through the gradual modification, in the course of natural descent, of earlier and simpler forms. Huxley, it is true, refused to face the alternative, and cried, "a plague o' both your houses V 9 Nothing can be said, however, in justification of such a position on the part of a man of science. Hypotheses non fingo has never been a sound or serviceable maxim; it had certainly not been by following it that the sciences of astronomy and geology had developed. Now, if other hypotheses, beyond the two in question, were conceivable in 1844, certainly no others were seriously advanced. The first concern of a biologist of the period should, then, have been to compare the two hypotheses of the origin of species, in the light of the then known principles and facts, hereafter to be enumerated. This comparison, if made honestly, by a logically competent mind, must necessarily have led, at almost any time after 1840, to the conclusion to which Spencer tells us that he found himself forced somewhere about 1850. By this time, he says:

After these preliminaries, the reader is prepared for viewing the arguments for evolutionism, now to be recalled in a more detailed manner, in their proper historical and logical perspective.

1. Argument from the General Presumption of Science against "Supernatural" Explanations of Phenomena.—In his "Belfast Address," 1874, Tyndall pointed out that the main argument for