A certain piquancy is provided for these particular lectures by the fact that the young Julian Huxley, the grandson of one of the most effective champions of Darwinism, was a charter member of the faculty of the then Rice Institute of Technology at its opening in 1912.
2.
See CockshutA. O. J., Anglican attitudes: A study of victorian religious controversies (London, 1959) for an informative treatment of mid-nineteenth century crises in the religious establishment.
3.
See my A conscience in conflict: The life of St George Jackson Mivart (New York, 1960).
4.
Thus, Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, commenting on a letter from the Dean of York, supporting the Mosaic Chronology and wishing to engage William Buckland (whom Peel was about to appoint Dean of Westminster) in a debate over the age of the earth, urged Buckland to publish a popular account which would teach the layman the new truths of geology. “Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred”, he wrote on 27 December 1844, “will vote … against the Geological Society and for the Dean and Moses—and this in a great measure because the proofs of the conclusions of Geology are not set before them in plain language and with brevity” (British Museum MS Add. 40556, ff. 296–7, Peel Collection). By the 1860s the public had had their instruction in geology.
5.
It should be noted that Darwin did not use the idea of competition or “struggle for existence” in the interpersonal and aggressive sense in which Spencer and the social Darwinists used it and in which Greene interprets it. “I should premise”, Darwin wrote in his first edition of the Origin, “that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny ….” DarwinCharles, On the origin of species (Reprint of the first edition, Philosophical Library, New York, 1951) 54.
6.
HuxleyThomas H., On our knowledge of the causes of the phenomena of organic nature (London, 1863) 134.
7.
See, for instance, Richard Owen's reconstruction of the habits of Mylodon based upon a functional analysis of the structural characteristics of its fossil remains, in his Description of the skeleton of an extinct gigantic sloth … (Royal College of Surgeons, London, 1842). It was this kind of reconstruction which seemed so marvellous an accomplishment of natural science to the layman.
8.
For a contemporary and much more meaningful and sophisticated treatment of cultural evolution one might read the series of essays edited by SahlinsMarshall D.SerivceElman R., Evolution and culture (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1960).
9.
30 April 1863: HuxleyLeonard, The life and letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (London, 1900) i, 239.
