Magna est veritas et praevalebit!  Truth is great, certainly, but considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing.  When, towards the end of 1862, I had finished writing “Man’s Place in Nature,” I could say with a good conscience that my conclusions “had not been formed hastily or enunciated crudely.”  I thought I had earned the right to publish them, and even fancied I might be thanked rather than reproved for doing so.  However, in my anxiety to publish 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 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 that which I had resolved to do, upon grounds which I conceived to be right. [(As to this advice not to publish “Man’s Place” for fear of misrepresentation on the score of morals, he said, in criticising an attack of this sort made upon Darwin in the “Quarterly” for July 1876:—­] “It seemed to me, however, that a man of science has no raison d’etre at all, unless he is willing to face much greater risks than these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for much—­that they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of letters, for example.”) 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 wicked.  Indeed, it surprises me at times to think how anyone who had sunk so low could since have emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability.  Personally, like the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I did not feel “one penny the worse.”  Translated into several languages, the book reached a wider public than I had ever hoped for; being largely helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine advertisements to which I referred.  It has had the honour of being freely utilised without acknowledgment by writers of repute; and finally it achieved the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten.