[Illustration:  CHARLES DARWIN From the painting by Hon. John Collier in the National Portrait Gallery]

It is not surprising that, if an anatomist so distinguished and acute as was Owen allowed his judgment to be completely overborne by the storm of prejudice against Darwinism, those who were not anatomists should have held up to ridicule all idea of comparison between man and the apes.  In The Origin of Species itself, no elaborate attempt had been made to set forth the anatomical arguments in favour of or against a community of descent for man and the apes.  But it was made sufficiently plain, and the public laid hold of the point eagerly, that the doctrine of descent was not meant to exclude man from the field of its operation.  Huxley, in the course of his ordinary work as Professor of Biology, had, among many other subjects, naturally turned his attention to the anatomy and classification of the higher animals.  When Owen’s essay appeared, he found that he was unable to agree with many of the conclusions contained in it, and had set about a renewed investigation of the matter.  Thus it happened that, when the question became prominent, in 1860, Huxley was ready with material contributions to it.  He believed, moreover, that, as Darwin was not specially acquainted with the anatomy and development of vertebrates, there was an opportunity for doing a real service to the cause of evolution.  Accordingly, in 1860, he took for the subject of a series of lectures to workingmen the “Relation of Man to the Lower Animals,” and, in 1862, expanded the lectures into a volume called Man’s Place in Nature.  When it was ready, he was prepared to say with a good conscience that his conclusions “had not been formed hastily or enunciated crudely.”

“I thought,” he wrote in the preface to the 1894 edition, “I had earned the right to publish them, and even fancied I might be thanked, rather than reproved, for so doing.  However, in my anxiety to promulgate nothing erroneous, I asked a highly competent anatomist and very good friend of mine to look through my proofs, and, if he could, point out any errors of fact.  I was well pleased when he returned them without any criticism on that score; but my satisfaction was speedily dashed by the very earnest warning, as to the consequences of publication, which my friend’s interest in my welfare led him to give; but, as I have confessed elsewhere, when I was a young man there was just a little—­a mere soupcon—­in my composition of that tenacity of purpose which has another name, and I felt sure that all the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to me as the giving up of that which I had resolved to do, upon grounds which I conceived to be right.  So the book came out, and I must do my friend the justice to say that his forecast was completely justified.  The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation and ridicule for some years; and I was even as one of the