Pray give my kindest regards and best wishes for the New Year to Mrs. Hooker, and tell her that if she, of her own natural sagacity and knowledge of the naughtiness of my heart, affirms that I wrote the article, I shall not contradict her—­but that for reasons of state—­I must not be supposed to say anything.  I am pretty certain the Saturday article was not written by Owen.  On internal grounds, because no word in it exceeds an inch in length; on external, from what Cook said to me.  The article is weak enough and one-sided enough, but looking at the various forces in action, I think Cook has fully redeemed his promise to me.

I went down to Sir P. Egerton on Tuesday—­was ill when I started, got worse and had to come back on Thursday.  I am all adrift now, but I couldn’t stand being in the house any longer.  I wish I had been born an an-hepatous foetus.

All sorts of good wishes to you, and may you and I and Tyndalides, and one or two more bricks, be in as good fighting order in 1861 as in 1860.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Speaking of this period and the half-dozen preceding years, in his 1894 preface to “Man’s Place in Nature” he says:—­]

Among the many problems which came under my consideration, the position of the human species in zoological classification was one of the most serious.  Indeed, at that time it was a burning question in the sense that those who touched it were almost certain to burn their fingers severely.  It was not so very long since my kind friend, Sir William Lawrence, one of the ablest men whom I have known, had been well-nigh ostracised for his book “On Man,” which now might be read in a Sunday school without surprising anybody; it was only a few years since the electors to the chair of Natural History in a famous northern university had refused to invite a very distinguished man to occupy it because he advocated the doctrine of the diversity of species of mankind, or what was called “polygeny.”  Even among those who considered man from the point of view, not of vulgar prejudice, but of science, opinions lay poles asunder.  Linnaeus had taken one view, Cuvier another; and among my senior contemporaries, men like Lyell, regarded by many as revolutionaries of the deepest dye, were strongly opposed to anything which tended to break down the barrier between man and the rest of the animal world.

My own mind was by no means definitely made up about this matter when, in the year 1857, a paper was read before the Linnean Society “On the Characters, Principles of Division and Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia,” in which certain anatomical features of the brain were said to be “peculiar to the genus ‘Homo,’” and were made the chief ground for separating that genus from all other mammals and placing him in a division, “Archencephala,” apart from, and superior to, all the rest.  As these statements did not agree with the opinions I had formed, I set to work to reinvestigate the subject; and soon satisfied myself that the structures in question were not peculiar to Man, but were shared by him with all the higher and many of the lower apes.  I embarked in no public discussion of these matters, but my attention being thus drawn to them, I studied the whole question of the structural relations of Man to the next lower existing forms, with much care.  And, of course, I embodied my conclusions in my teaching.