edge is "quite shut out," not because they have by nature no sense enabling them to see it, but because they choose to close its door and to starve it into atrophy. They are the men who can not rise to the higher interpretations even of their own science, or read the discoveries of their own dissecting knife. We accept their teaching as far as it goes, but we need not and can not accept their mastership. We desire to assimilate every fact which they can prove, and we are grateful for all the thought, and care, and labor, through which alone these facts have been established. But other men must be allowed to see other related facts to which experts may be blind. On any pure question of biology there is no man to whom we can go more safely than to Prof. Huxley. An original and careful investigator, a brilliant expositor, and in many things a cautious reasoner, he enjoys, on his own ground, a high and a just authority. But off that ground he passes iDto the shadows of a great eclipse. He labors under insuperable bias. Through this, and this alone, and through—we may be sure—no conscious unfaithfulness to truth, there is one great subject on which his judgment is warped by an obvious antipathy. On all questions bearing on "Christian theology" he is not to be trusted for a moment. Loud and confident in matters on which both he and we are profoundly ignorant, we see him hardly less boisterous in asserting ignorance where the materials of knowledge lie abundant to our hands. We have seen his canons of criticism—how rude and undiscerning; his claim for the physical sciences—how inflated; his own dealings with one of them—how shallow and how dogmatic. Prof. Huxley may depend upon it that the time has come when the great questions raised by the indisputable facts of Quaternary geology—of which the Deluge is perhaps the least important must be taken out of the hands of men who, by his own confession, have hitherto dwelt with them in no voice more articulate than a smile, and in no attitude more intellectual than a shrug.—Nineteenth Century.
Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/81
Appearance
PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE WAR-PATH.
71
In a paper by Prof. Warren Upham, On the Cause of the Glacial Period, it is admitted, on the evidence afforded by a large number of recent independent discoveries and calculations, that the date of that period can not be set further back than about ten thousand years; the dates surmised by Croll and Geikie are therefore vastly exaggerated and impossible, and with them must fall the cosmical theory. Hence new causes must be sought. Prof. Upham looks for them in a higher elevation of the continent, which seems, however, to have been followed by a depression under the ice-sheet; a land barrier existing between Europe and Greenland, and shutting southern waters out from the Arctic Ocean; and a submergence of the Isthmus of Panama, turning the southern waters toward the Pacific Ocean.