“I have just read the Edinburgh, which, without doubt is by ——.  It is extremely malignant, clever, and, I fear, will be very damaging.  He is atrociously severe on Huxley’s lecture, and very bitter against Hooker.  So we three enjoyed it together.  Not that I really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for one night; but I have quite got over it to-day.  It requires much study to appreciate all the bitter spite of many of the remarks against me; indeed I did not discover all myself.  It scandalously misrepresents many parts.  He misquotes some passages, altering words within inverted commas....  It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which ——­ hates me.”

As Owen was still alive when this letter was published in Darwin’s Life, the authorship of the review was not actually mentioned; but it is necessary to mention it, as it justifies the sternness with which Huxley exposed Owen on an occasion shortly to be described.  The review in the Quarterly was written by Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, in July, 1860, and almost at once the authorship of it became known to Darwin’s friends.  In connection with this, Huxley wrote in 1887, in Darwin’s Life and Letters: 

“I doubt if there was any man then living who had a better right (than Darwin) to expect that anything he might choose to say on such a question as the Origin of Species would be listened to with profound attention, and discussed with respect.  And there was certainly no man whose personal character should have afforded a better safeguard against attacks, instinct with malignity and spiced with shameless impertinences.  Yet such was the portion of one of the kindest and truest men that it was ever my good fortune to know; and years had to pass away before misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation ceased to be the most notable constituents of the majority of the multitudinous criticisms of his work which poured from the press.  I am loth to rake up any of these ancient scandals from their well-deserved oblivion; but I must make good a statement which may seem overcharged to the present generation, and there is no piece justificative more apt for the purpose or more worthy of such dishonour than the article in the Quarterly Review for July, 1860.  Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a ‘flighty’ person who endeavours to ’prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,’ and whose ’mode of dealing with nature’ is reprobated as ’utterly dishonourable to natural science.’  And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin’s equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence,