These lectures met with an annoying amount of success.  They were not cast into permanent form, for he grudged the time necessary to prepare them for the press.  However, he gave a Mr. Hardwicke permission to take them down in shorthand as delivered for the use of the audience.  But no sooner were they printed, than they had a large sale.  Writing to Sir J.D.  Hooker early in the following month, he says:]

I fully meant to have sent you all the successive lectures as they came out, and I forward a set with all manner of apologies for my delinquency.  I am such a ’umble-minded party that I never imagined the lectures as delivered would be worth bringing out at all, and I knew I had no time to work them out.  Now, I lament I did not publish them myself and turn an honest penny by them as I suspect Hardwicke is doing.  He is advertising them everywhere, confound him.

I wish when you have read them you would tell me whether you think it would be worthwhile for me to re-edit, enlarge, and illustrate them by and by.

[And on January 28 Sir Charles Lyell writes to him:—­

I do grudge Hardwicke very much having not only the publisher’s but the author’s profits.  It so often happens that popular lectures designed for a class and inspired by an attentive audience’s sympathy are better than any writing in the closet for the purpose of educating the many as readers, and of remunerating the publisher and author.  I would lose no time in considering well what steps to take to rescue the copyright of the third thousand.

As for the value of the work thus done in support of Darwin’s theory, it is worth while quoting the words of Lord Kelvin, when, as President of the Royal Society in 1894, it fell to him to award Huxley the Darwin Medal:—­

To the world at large, perhaps, Mr. Huxley’s share in moulding the thesis of natural selection is less well-known than is his bold unwearied exposition and defence of it after it had been made public.  And, indeed, a speculative trifler, revelling in the problems of the “might have been,” would find a congenial theme in the inquiry how soon what we now call “Darwinism” would have met with the acceptance with which it has met, and gained the power which it has gained, had it not been for the brilliant advocacy with which in its early days it was expounded to all classes of men.

That advocacy had one striking mark:  while it made or strove to make clear how deep the new view went down, and how far it reached, it never shrank from trying to make equally clear the limit beyond which it could not go.]

CHAPTER 1.16.

1860-1861.

[The letters given in the following chapters illustrate the occupations and interests of the years 1860 to 1863, apart from the struggle over the species question.

One of the most important and most engrossing was the launching of a scientific quarterly to do more systematically and thoroughly what had been done since 1858 in the fortnightly scientific column of the “Saturday Review.”  Its genesis is explained in the following letter:—­]