Its value for Huxley was that it was “incomparably more probable than the creation hypothesis”; that it was “a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms, which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work”; that it provided “clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested”; that it freed us “for ever from the dilemma--refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner?” Indeed, the hypothesis did away with this dilemma, even if it were itself to disappear; for “if we had none of us been able to discern the paramount significance of some of the most patent and notorious of natural facts, until they were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma--creation or nothing? It was obvious that, hereafter, the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature.” Therefore, “the only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth, was to accept ‘Darwinism’ as a working hypothesis, and see what could be made of it.” Furthermore, “Whatever may be the ultimate fate of the particular theory put forth by Darwin, ... all the ingenuity and all the learning of hostile critics has not enabled them to adduce a solitary fact, of which it can be said, this is irreconcilable with the Darwinian theory.” Taking this argument as a whole, it seems to me to amount to the words of Mercutio quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In the following year (1888) Huxley wrote the Obituary Notice of Darwin for the Proceedings of the Royal Society: it is reprinted in “Darwiniana” (pp. 253 _et seq._). In this admirable essay the author recognises that Darwin evidently accepted evolution before he could offer any explanation of the motive cause by which that process took place. The theory of descent with modification had often been thought of before, “but in the eyes of the naturalist of the ‘Beagle’ (and, probably, in those of most sober thinkers), the advocates of transmutation had done the doctrine they expounded more harm than good.” Huxley speaks of the “Origin” as “one of the hardest books to master,” in this agreeing with Hooker (see p. 111). In this essay Huxley gives a clear and excellent statement of natural selection, prefaced by these words (p. 287):--