In 1880 he continued the subject by publishing Unconscious Memory.  Chapter iv of this book is concerned with a personal quarrel between himself and Charles Darwin which arose out of the publication by Charles Darwin of Dr. Krause’s Life of Erasmus Darwin.  We need not enter into particulars here, the matter is fully dealt with in a pamphlet, Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler:  A Step towards Reconciliation, which I wrote in 1911, the result of a correspondence between Mr. Francis Darwin and myself.  Before this correspondence took place Mr. Francis Darwin had made several public allusions to Life and Habit; and in September, 1908, in his inaugural address to the British Association at Dublin, he did Butler the posthumous honour of quoting from his translation of Hering’s lecture “On Memory,” which is in Unconscious Memory, and of mentioning Butler as having enunciated the theory contained in Life and Habit.

In 1886 Butler published his last book on evolution, Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification?  His other contributions to the subject are some essays, written for the Examiner in 1879, “God the Known and God the Unknown,” which were re-published by Mr. Fifield in 1909, and the articles “The Deadlock in Darwinism” which appeared in the Universal Review in 1890 and are contained in this volume; some further notes on evolution will be found in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912).

It was while he was writing Life and Habit that I first met him.  For several years he had been in the habit of spending six or eight weeks of the summer in Italy and the Canton Ticino, generally making Faido his headquarters.  Many a page of his books was written while resting by the fountain of some subalpine village or waiting in the shade of the chestnuts till the light came so that he could continue a sketch.  Every year he returned home by a different route, and thus gradually became acquainted with every part of the Canton and North Italy.  There is scarcely a town or village, a point of view, a building, statue or picture in all this country with which he was not familiar.  In 1878 he happened to be on the Sacro Monte above Varese at the time I took my holiday; there I joined him, and nearly every year afterwards we were in Italy together.

He was always a delightful companion, and perhaps at his gayest on these occasions.  “A man’s holiday,” he would say, “is his garden,” and he set out to enjoy himself and to make everyone about him enjoy themselves too.  I told him the old schoolboy muddle about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco and saying:  “We shall this day light up such a fire in England as I trust shall never be put out.”  He had not heard it before and, though amused, appeared preoccupied, and perhaps a little jealous, during the rest of the evening.  Next morning, while he was pouring out his coffee, his eyes twinkled and he said, with assumed carelessness: 

“By the by, do you remember?—­wasn’t it Columbus who bashed the egg down on the table and said ’Eppur non si muove’?”