{201} A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.

{223} For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African Negros, see Burton’s “Lake Regions of Central Africa,” vol. ii. pp. 341-60.

{229} A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution.

{262} A Lecture delivered at the Mechanics’ Institute, Odiham, 1857.

{290} Lecture delivered at Reading, 1846.

{313} Novalis, I think, says that one’s own thought gains quite infinitely in value as soon as one finds it shared by even one other human being.  The saying has proved true, at least, to me.  The morning after this paper was read, I received a book, “The Genesis of Species, by St. George Mivart, F.R.S.”  The name of the author demanded all attention and respect; and as I read on, I found him, to my exceeding pleasure, advocating views which I had long held, with a learning and ability to which I have no pretensions.  The book will, doubtless, excite much useful criticism and discussion in the scientific world.  I hope that it may do the same in the clerical world; and I earnestly beg those clergymen who heard me with so much patience and courtesy at Sion College, to ponder well Mr. Mivart’s last chapter, on “Theology and Evolution.”

{320} Quoted from Schleiden’s “The Plant, a Biography.”—­Lecture XI. in fine.

{326} I am well aware what a serious question is opened up in these words.  The fact that the great majority of workers among the social insects are barren females or nuns, devoting themselves to the care of other individuals’ offspring, by an act of self-sacrifice, and that by means of that self-sacrifice these communities grow large and prosperous, ought to be well weighed just now; both by those who hold that morality has been evolved from perceptions of what was useful or pleasurable, and by those who hold as I do that morality is one, immutable and eternal.  Those who take the former view (confounding, as Mr. Mivart well points out in his Genesis of Species, “material” and “formal” morality) have no difficulty in tracing the germs of the highest human morality in animals; for self-interest is, in their eyes, the ultimate ground of morality, and the average animal is utterly selfish.  But certain animals perform acts, as in the case of working bees and ants, and (as I hold) in the case of mothers working for and protecting their offspring, which at least seem formally moral; because they seem founded on self-sacrifice.  I am well aware, I say again, of the very serious admissions which we clergymen should have to make if we confessed that these acts really are that which they seem to be.  But I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being; I am ready, with Socrates, to follow the Logos whithersoever it leads; and I hope that Mr. Mivart will reconsider the two latter paragraphs of p. 196, and let his “thoughts play freely” round this curious subject.  Perhaps, in so doing, he may lay his hand on an even sharper weapon than those which he has already used against the sensationalist theory of morals.