But the holiday was by no means spent entirely in recreation.  One week was devoted to the British Association; another to the examination of some interesting fossils at Elgin; while the last three weeks were occupied in writing two long articles, “Mr. Darwin’s Critics,” and the address entitled “Administrative Nihilism” referred to above, as well as a review of Dana’s “Crinoids.”  The former, which appeared in the “Contemporary Review” for November ("Collected Essays” 2 120-187) was a review of (1) “Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection,” by A.R.  Wallace, (2) “The Genesis of Species,” by St. George Mivart, F.R.S., and (3) an article in the “Quarterly” for July 1871, on Darwin’s “Descent of Man.”]

“I am Darwin’s bull-dog,” [he once said, and the “Quarterly Reviewer’s” treatment of Darwin,] “alike unjust and unbecoming,” [provoked him into immediate action.] “I am about sending you,” [he writes to Haeckel on November 2,] “a little review of some of Darwin’s critics.  The dogs have been barking at his heels too much of late.” [Apart from this stricture, however, he notes the] “happy change” [which] “has come over Mr. Darwin’s critics.  The mixture of ignorance and insolence which at first characterised a large proportion of the attacks with which he was assailed, is no longer the sad distinction of anti-Darwinian criticism.” [Notes too] “that, in a dozen years, the ‘Origin of Species’ has worked as complete a revolution in biological science as the ‘Principia’ did in astronomy—­and it has done so, because, in the words of Helmholtz, it contains ’an essentially new creative thought.’”

[The essay is particularly interesting as giving evidence of his skill and knowledge in dealing with psychology, as against the “Quarterly Reviewer,” and even with such an unlikely subject as scholastic metaphysics, so that, by an odd turn of events, he appeared in the novel character of a defender of Catholic orthodoxy against an attempt from within that Church to prove that its teachings have in reality always been in harmony with the requirements of modern science.  For Mr. Mivart, while twitting the generality of men of science with their ignorance of the real doctrines of his church, gave a reference to the Jesuit theologian Suarez, the latest great representative of scholasticism, as following St. Augustine in asserting, not direct, but derivative creation, that is to say, evolution from primordial matter endued with certain powers.  Startled by this statement, Huxley investigated the works of the learned Jesuit, and found not only that Mr. Mivart’s reference to the Metaphysical Disputations was not to the point, but that in the “Tractatus de opere sex Dierum,” Suarez expressly and emphatically rejects this doctrine and reprehends Augustine for asserting it.]

By great good luck [he writes to Darwin from St. Andrews] there is an excellent library here, with a good copy of Suarez, in a dozen big folios.  Among these I dived, to the great astonishment of the librarian, and looking into them as “the careful robin eyes the delver’s toil” (vide “Idylls"), I carried off the two venerable clasped volumes which were most promising.