Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The success of “Man’s Place” was immediate, despite such criticisms as that of the “Athenaeum” that “Lyell’s object is to make man old, Huxley’s to degrade him.”  By the middle of February it reached its second thousand; in July it is heard of as republished in America; at the same time L. Buchner writes that he wished to translate it into German, but finds himself forestalled by Victor Carus.  From another aspect, Lord Enniskillen, thanking him for the book, says (March 3), “I believe you are already excommunicated by book, bell, and candle,” while in an undated note, Bollaert writes, “The Bishop of Oxford the other day spoke about ’the church having been in danger of late, by such books as Colenso’s, but that it (the church) was now restored.’  And this at a time, he might have added, when the works of Darwin, Lyell, and Huxley are torn from the hands of Mudie’s shopmen, as if they were novels—­(see “Daily Telegraph,” April 10).”

At the same time, the impression left by his work upon the minds of the leading men of science may be judged from a few words of Sir Charles Lyell, who writes to a friend on March 15, 1863 ("Life and Letters” 2 366):—­

Huxley’s second thousand is going off well.  If he had leisure like you and me, and the vigour and logic of the lectures, and his address to the Geological Society, and half a dozen other recent works (letters to the “Times” on Darwin, etc.), had been all in one book, what a position he would occupy!  I entreated him not to undertake the “Natural History Review” before it began.  The responsibility all falls on the man of chief energy and talent; it is a quarterly mischief, and will end in knocking him up.

A similar estimate appears from an earlier letter of March 11, 1859 ("Life and Letters” 2 321), when he quotes Huxley’s opinion of Mansel’s Bampton Lectures on the “Limits of Religious Thought":—­

A friend of mine, Huxley, who will soon take rank as one of the first naturalists we have ever produced, begged me to read these sermons as first rate,] “although, regarding the author as a churchman, you will probably compare him, as I did, to the drunken fellow in Hogarth’s contested election, who is sawing through the signpost at the other party’s public-house, forgetting he is sitting at the other end of it.  But read them as a piece of clear and unanswerable reasoning.”

[In the 1894 preface to the re-issue of “Man’s Place” in the Collected Essays, Huxley speaks as follows of the warnings he received against publishing on so dangerous a topic, of the storm which broke upon his head, and the small result which, in the long run, it produced (In September 1887 he wrote to Mr. Edward Clodd—­]"All the propositions laid down in the wicked book, which was so well anathematised a quarter of a century ago, are now taught in the text-books.  What a droll world it is!"):—­