wicked.  Indeed, it surprises me, at times, to think how anyone who had sunk so low could have emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability.”

Further, in the same preface, Huxley strongly advises others to imitate his action in this matter.  There are now, and no doubt there always will be, truths “plainly obvious and generally denied.”  Whoever attacks the current ideas is certain, unless human nature changes greatly, to encounter a bitter opposition, and there will always be those among his friends who recommend him to temper truth by prudence.  Huxley’s advice is different: 

“If there is a young man of the present generation who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. Veritas praevalebit—­some day; and, even if she does not prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and wiser for having tried to help her.  And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and pains.”

Although they were written so long ago, the lectures on “Man’s Place in Nature” are still the best existing treatise on the subject, and we shall give an outline of them, mentioning the chief points in which further work has been done.  Information concerning the man-like apes was scattered in very different places, in the grave records of scientific societies, in the letters of travellers and missionaries, in the reports of the zooelogical societies which had been in possession of living specimens.  The facts had to be sifted out from a great mass of verbiage and unfounded statement.  With a characteristic desire for historical accuracy, more usual in a man of letters than in an anatomist, Huxley began with a study of classical and mediaeval legends of the existence of pigmies and man-like creatures; but, while recognising that legends of satyrs and fauns were presages of the discovery of man-like apes, he was unable to find any actual record earlier than that contained in Pigafetta’s Description of the Kingdom of Congo, drawn up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor and published in 1598.  The descriptions and figures in this work apparently referred to chimpanzees.  From this date onwards he traces the literature of the animals in question, and then proceeds to give an account of them.

There are four distinct kinds of man-like apes:  in Eastern Asia the Orangs and the Gibbons (although some later writers differ from Huxley in removing the Gibbons from the group of anthropoids); in Western Africa, the Chimpanzees and the Gorillas.  All these have certain characters in common.  They are inhabitants of the old world; they all have the same number of teeth as man, possessing four incisors, two canines, four premolars, and six true molars in each jaw, in the adult condition, while the milk dentition, as in man, consists of twenty teeth,—­four