Throughout the subsequent special sessions of this meeting Huxley could not appear. He gave the impression of being aged but not infirm, and no one realised that he had spoken his last word as champion of the law of evolution. (See, however, below.) Such criticism of the address as he actually expressed reappears in the leading article, "Past and Present," which he wrote for "Nature" to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation (November 1, 1894). The essence of the criticism is that with whatever demonstrations of hostility to parts of the Darwinian theory Lord Salisbury covered the retreat of his party from their ancient positions, he admitted the validity of the main points for which Darwin contended.] The essence of this great work (the "Origin of Species") may be stated summarily thus: it affirms the mutability of species and the descent of living forms, separated by differences of more than varietal value, from one stock. That is to say, it propounds the doctrine of evolution as far as biology is concerned. So far, we have merely a restatement of a doctrine which, in its most general form, is as old as scientific speculation. So far, we have the two theses which were declared to be scientifically absurd and theologically damnable by the Bishop of Oxford in 1860. It is also of these two fundamental doctrines that, at the meeting of the British Association in 1894, the Chancellor of the University of Oxford spoke as follows:-- "Another lasting and unquestioned effect has resulted from Darwin's work. He has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species..." "Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by differences far exceeding those that distinguished what we know as species have yet descended from common ancestors." Undoubtedly, every one conversant with the state of biological science is aware that general opinion has long had good reason for making the volte face thus indicated. It is also mere justice to Darwin to say that this "lasting and unquestioned" revolution is, in a very real sense, his work. And yet it is also true that, if all the conceptions promulgated in the "Origin of Species" which are peculiarly Darwinian were swept away, the theory of the evolution of animals and plants would not be in the slightest degree shaken. [The strain of this single effort was considerable] "I am frightfully tired," [he wrote on August 11,] "but the game was worth the candle." [Letters to Sir J.D. Hooker and to Professor Lewis Campbell contain his own account of the affair. The reference in the latter to the priests is in reply to Professor Campbell's story of one of Jowett's last sayings. They had been talking of the collective power of the priesthood to resist the introduction of new ideas; a long pause ensued, and the old man seemed to have slipped off into a doze, when he suddenly broke the silence by saying,] "The priests will always be too many for you."