capable of errors upon particular points which were palpable to every competent specialist.
Yet the layman was, after all, sound in his main thesis; and, what is far more significant, his thesis was based upon sound and sensible arguments, substantially the same arguments that Huxley was destined before long to use in the same cause, though with far superior skill as a debater. It will, I think, appear impossible to acquit the young Huxley of a certain measure of scientific Pharisaism in this episode. He was so shocked by minor breaches of scientific propriety, in the "Vestiges," that he forgot the weightier matters of the law of scientific method. In his irritation at Chambers's incidental slips in zoology, he became blind to the importance and suggestiveness of the general outline of that writer's reasoning. Quite other was Alfred Russel Wallace's reaction upon the little book. As early as 1845 he wrote:
I have rather a more favorable opinion of the "Vestiges" than you appear to have. I do not consider it a hasty generalization, but rather as an ingenious hypothesis, strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies', but which remains to be proved by more facts and the additional light which more research may throw upon the problem. It furnishes a subject for every observer of nature to attend to; every fact he observes will make either for or against it.[1]
By 1847 Wallace had become thoroughly convinced of the truth of transf ormism; and from that time forward his mind was occupied with the problem of explaining the cause and modus operandi of evolution. At this time, he writes:
The great problem of the origin of species was already distinctly formulated in my mind. . . . I believed the conception of evolution through natural law, so clearly formulated in the "Vestiges," to be, so far as it went, a true one; and I firmly believed a full and careful study of the facts of nature would ultimately lead to the solution of the mystery.
Wallace thus escaped the fatal error in logical procedure into which Huxley fell. For Huxley, in the passage already cited, gives as one of his two reasons for refusing to accept, even provisionally, the evolutionary hypothesis, the fact that "no adequate suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed" had then been made. But, that no causal explanation of a fact is at hand, is not good reason for denying the fact, if serious evidence of its reality is presented. Wallace properly discriminated the two issues; becoming first convinced that there was an established balance of scientific probability in favor of the fact, he then set himself upon the quest of a hypothesis that would explain it. He verily had his reward; a decade later he appeared, with Darwin, as joint author of the doctrine of natural selection.
- ↑ Wallace, "My Life," I., 254. Writing sixty years after, Dr. Wallace adds his final judgment of the "Vestiges," "a book which, in my opinion, has always been undervalued, and which, when it first appeared, was almost as much abused, and for much the same reasons, as was Darwin's 'Origin of Species' fifteen years later" {ibid.).
