identical, and the fact to be established is the same. If it cannot be established, the inferences, whether religious or scientific, must go with it. Some readers complained that Huxley was slaying the slain, and that it was as needless to disprove the legend of Noah as the story of Jack the Giant-Killer. The complaint was an incidental and perhaps not unnatural result of his method. His strategical instinct led him to seize the weakest point in the line of defence. He had occupied the key of the position; and though a guerilla war may still be carried on by people who don't know when they are beaten, their final defeat can only be a question of time. But that was just the point which hasty readers might fail to perceive. The disproof of the flood implied, as he held, the disintegration of the whole foundations of orthodox belief in the Hebrew legends. The argument about the Gadarene swine, as he admitted, seemed to some people to be superfluous—though one gallant antagonist still held to the truth of the legend. When, indeed, it branched out into the singular question whether the miracle, if it had taken place, would have involved a breach of the local laws as well as of the laws of nature, he apologised for his pugnacity by the incidental
