Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Evolution (Biology)
Mr. Mivart, whose opinions so often concur with those of the Quarterly
Reviewer, puts the case in a way, which I much regret to be obliged to say,
is, in my judgment, quite as incorrect; though the injustice may be less
glaring. He says that the theory of natural selection is, in general,
exclusively associated with the name of Mr. Darwin, "on account of the
noble self-abnegation of Mr. Wallace." As I have said, no one can honour
Mr. Wallace more than I do, both for what he has done and for what he has
not done, in his relation to Mr. Darwin. And perhaps nothing is more
creditable to him than his frank declaration that he could not have written
such a work as the "Origin of Species." But, by this declaration, the
person most directly interested in the matter repudiates, by anticipation,
Mr. Mivart's suggestion that Mr. Darwin's eminence is more or less due to
Mr. Wallace's modesty.
VI
EVOLUTION IN BIOLOGY
[1878]
In the former half of the eighteenth century, the term "evolution" was
introduced into biological writings, in order to denote the mode in which
some of the most eminent physiologists of that time conceived that the
generations of living things took place; in opposition to the hypothesis
advocated, in the preceding century, by Harvey in that remarkable work
[Footnote: The _Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium_, which Dr.
George Ent extracted from him and published in 1651.] which would give him
a claim to rank among the founders of biological science, even had he not
been the discoverer of the circulation of the blood.
One of Harvey's prime objects is to defend and establish, on the basis of
direct observation, the opinion already held by Aristotle; that, in the
higher animals at any rate, the formation of the new organism by the
process of generation takes place, not suddenly, by simultaneous accretion
of rudiments of all, or of the most important, of the organs of the adult;
nor by sudden metamorphosis of a formative substance into a miniature of
the whole, which subsequently grows; but by _epigenesis_, or
successive differentiation of a relatively homogeneous rudiment into the
parts and structures which are characteristic of the adult.
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