So striking was his power in this last respect, that a humorous London chronicler once advised a bigamist, as his only hope, to induce Mr.Gladstone to explain away one of his wives.
At the basis of this theologico-geological structure Mr.Gladstone placed what he found in the text of Genesis: "A grand fourfold division" of animated Nature "set forth in an orderly succession of times." And he arranged this order and succession of creation as follows: "First, the water population; secondly, the air population; thirdly, the land population of animals; fourthly, the land population consummated in man." His next step was to slide in upon this basis the apparently harmless proposition that this division and sequence "is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact." Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an argument out of the coincidences thus secured between the record in the Hebrew sacred books and the truths revealed by science as regards this order and sequence, and he easily arrived at the desired conclusion with which he crowned the whole structure, namely, as regards the writer of Genesis, that "his knowledge was divine."(180) (180) See Mr.Gladstone's Dawn of Creation and Worship, a reply to Dr.
Reville, in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1885.
Such was the skeleton of the structure; it was abundantly decorated with the rhetoric in which Mr.Gladstone is so skilful an artificer, and it towered above "the average man" as a structure beautiful and invincible--like some Chinese fortress in the nineteenth century, faced with porcelain and defended with crossbows.
Its strength was soon seen to be unreal.

In an essay admirable in its temper, overwhelming in its facts, and absolutely convincing in its argument, Prof.Huxley, late President of the Royal Society, and doubtless the most eminent contemporary authority on the scientific questions concerned, took up the matter.
Mr.Gladstone's first proposition, that the sacred writings give us a great "fourfold division" created "in an orderly succession of times," Prof.Huxley did not presume to gainsay.
As to Mr.Gladstone's second proposition, that "this great fourfold division...

created in an orderly succession of times...

has been so affirmed in our own time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact," Prof.Huxley showed that, as a matter of fact, no such "fourfold division" and "orderly succession" exist; that, so far from establishing Mr.Gladstone's assumption that the population of water, air, and land followed each other in the order given, "all the evidence we possess goes to prove that they did not"; that the distribution of fossils through the various strata proves that some land animals originated before sea animals; that there has been a mixing of sea, land, and air "population" utterly destructive to the "great fourfold division" and to the creation "in an orderly succession of times"; that, so far is the view presented in the sacred text, as stated by Mr.Gladstone, from having been "so affirmed in our own time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact" that Mr.Gladstone's assertion is "directly contradictory to facts known to every one who is acquainted with the elements of natural science"; that Mr.Gladstone's only geological authority, Cuvier, had died more than fifty years before, when geological science was in its infancy (and he might have added, when it was necessary to make every possible concession to the Church); and, finally, he challenged Mr.Gladstone to produce any contemporary authority in geological science who would support his so-called scriptural view.

And when, in a rejoinder, Mr.Gladstone attempted to support his view on the authority of Prof.Dana, Prof.
Huxley had no difficulty in showing from Prof.Dana's works that Mr.
Gladstone's inference was utterly unfounded.