My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

248 MY LIFEhim any problem inevolution or allied subjects—aninferiority which I did not feel either with Darwin orSir Charles Lyell. This was due, I think, to the factthat an enormous amount of Huxley's knowledge wasof a kind of which I possessed only an irreducibleminimum, and in which I often felt my deficiency.In the general anatomy and physiology of the wholeanimal kingdom, living and extinct, Huxley wasa master, the equal — perhaps the superior—of thegreatest authorities on these subjects in the scientificworld ;whereas I had never had an hour's instructionin either of them, had never seen a dissection of anykind, and never had any inclination to practise the artmyself. Whenever I had to touch upon these subjects,or to use them to enforce my arguments, I had to getboth my facts and my arguments at second hand, andappeal to authority both for facts and conclusions fromthem.And because I was thus ignorant, and becauseI had a positive distaste for all forms of anatomicaland physiological experiment, I perhaps overestimatedthis branch of knowledge and looked up tothose who possessed it in a pre-eminent degree asaltogether above myself.With Darwin and Lyell, on the other hand,although both possessed stores of knowledge farbeyond my own, yet I did possess some knowledgeof the same kind, and felt myself in a position tomake use of their facts and those of all other studentsin the same fields of research quite as well as themajority of those who had observed and recorded them.I had, however, very early in life noticed, that menwith immense knowledge did not always know how todraw just conclusions from that knowledge, and thatI myself was quite able to detect their errors ofreasoning-. I have never hesitated to differ from