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THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
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suicide; nor did he precisely accept the consolations which the first voice ultimately accepts in the sight of a lady and gentleman going to church with their daughter. He plunged into the war and found satisfaction in the simple joy of successful combat. When, thirty years after the round with Bishop Wilberforce, he again attended a similar meeting, and, veiling criticism in eulogy, welcomed Lord Salisbury's address as an involuntary testimony to the victory of evolutionism, he could look back with a feeling of triumph. A change of thought of unprecedented magnitude had been admitted even by the enemy. Some, indeed, held that the doctrine once scornfully rejected was to become the corner-stone of a new edifice of faith. In any case, if the chief value of a new speculation is even more in the fermentation which it sets up than in the results which it finally establishes, no one disputes the enormous importance of the Darwinian theories. I have sufficient reasons for not saying a word upon the part which they have played in the physical sciences. Their influence, however, upon other problems has been one of their most remarkable peculiarities. Huxley insisted upon such applications; and I will venture—not, of course,