In the impressive speech in which Huxley handed over the statue of Darwin to the Prince of Wales, as representative of the Trustees of the British Museum, on June 9th, 1885 (“Darwiniana,” p. 248), the references to Darwin are most consistent with the view that the support to evolution was held by the speaker to be the great work of his life. Natural selection is not mentioned. The next publication on this subject by Huxley is the celebrated chapter “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species,’” in the second volume of the great “Life and Letters.” In this chapter he speaks rather more confidently about natural selection than in some of the earlier essays and in the later speeches:-- “The reality and the importance of the natural processes on which Darwin founds his deductions are no more doubted than those of growth and multiplication; and, whether the full potency attributed to them is admitted or not, no one doubts their vast and far-reaching significance.” But of evolution he speaks far more strongly:-- “To any one who studies the signs of the times, the emergence of the philosophy of Evolution, [“bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness during the millennium of theological scholasticism”] in the attitude of claimant to the throne of the world of thought, from the limbo of hated and, as many hoped, forgotten things, is the most portentous event of the nineteenth century.” And for this he gives Darwin the credit. Later on he indicates the sense in which his keen appreciation of natural selection is to be understood. Thus, such strong statements as-- “... the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the ‘Origin’ in 1859, had the effect ... of the flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way”; and-- “The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the ‘Origin’ guided the benighted,” if they stood alone, might naturally be interpreted as an unqualified testimony to the permanent truth of natural selection. But this interpretation is expressly excluded:-- “Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of evolution, as applied to the organic world, took in Darwin’s hands, would prove to be final or not, was, to me, a matter of indifference. In my earliest criticisms of the ‘Origin’ I ventured to point that its logical foundation was insecure ...; and that insecurity remains.”