that Huxley fought for and triumphed for.

Long before the time of Darwin and Huxley, almost at the beginning of
recorded thought, philosophers busied themselves with the wonderful
diversity of the living world and with speculations as to how it had
assumed its present form. From the earliest times to this century,
theories as to the living world fell into one or other of two main
groups. The key-note of one group was the fixity of species: the
belief that from their first appearance species were separate,
independent entities, one never springing from another, new species
never arising by the modification in different directions of
descendants of already existing species. The key-note of the other
group of theories was the idea of progressive change: that animals and
plants as they passed along the stream of time were continually being
moulded by the forces surrounding them, and that the farther back the
mind could go in imagination the fewer and simpler species would be;
until, in the first beginning, all the existing diverse kinds of
living creatures would converge to a single point. It may be that, on
the whole, the idea of fixity prevailed more among thinkers with a
religious bias; but for the most part the theories were debated
independently of the tenets of any faith, Christian or other. There
were sceptical defenders of fixity and religious upholders of
evolution. However, in Christian countries, from the time of the
Reformation onwards, a change in this neutrality of religion to
theories of the living world took place. As Pascal prophesied,
Protestantism rejected the idea of an infallible Church in favour of
the idea of an infallible book, and, because it happened that this
book included an early legend of the origin of the world in a form
apparently incompatible with evolution, Protestantism and, to a lesser
and secondary extent, Catholicism, assumed the position that there was
no place for evolution in a Christian philosophy. At the end of last
century, and up to the middle of this century, the problem was not
raised in any acute form. The chief anatomists and botanists were
occupied with the investigation and discovery of facts, and, in an
ordinary way, without taking any particular trouble about it, accepted
more or less loosely the idea that species were fixed. Now and then an
evolutionist propounded his views; but, as a rule, he supported them
with a knowledge of facts very much inferior to that possesse