Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 18, 1892.

I was looking through “Man’s Place in Nature” the other day.  I do not think there is a word I need delete, nor anything I need add except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down.  That is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it would certainly ruin all my prospects.  I said, like the French fox-hunter in “Punch”, “I shall try.”

[The shrewd friend in question was none other than Sir William Lawrence, whose own experiences after publishing his book “On Man”, “which now might be read in a Sunday school without surprising anybody,” are alluded to in volume 1.

He had the satisfaction of passing on his unfinished work upon Spirula to efficient hands for completion; and in the way of new occupation, was thinking of some day “taking up the threads of late evolutionary speculation” in the theories of Weismann and others [See letter of September 28, to Romanes.], while actually planning out and reading for a series of “Working-Men’s Lectures on the Bible,” in which he should present to the unlearned the results of scientific study of the documents, and do for theology what he had done for zoology thirty years before.

The scheme drawn out in his note-book runs as follows:—­

1.  The subject and the method of treating it.

2.  Physical conditions:—­the place of Palestine in the Old World.

3.  The Rise of Israel:—­Judges, Samuel, Kings as far as Jeroboam II.

4.  The Fall of Israel.

5.  The Rise and Progress of Judaism.  Theocracy.

6.  The Final Dispersion.

7.  Prophetism.

8.  Nazarenism.

9.  Christianity.

10.  Muhammedanism.

11 and 12.  The Mythologies.

Although this scheme was never carried out, yet it was constantly before Huxley’s mind during the two years left to him.  If Death, who had come so near eight years before, would go on seeming to forget him, he meant to use these last days of his life in an effort to illuminate one more portion of the field of knowledge for the world at large.

As the physical strain of the Romanes Lecture and his liability to loss of voice warned him against any future attempt to deliver a course of lectures, he altered his design and prepared to put the substance of these Lectures to Working-Men into a Bible History for young people.  And indeed, he had got so far with his preparation, that the latter heading was down in his list of work for the last year of his life, 1895.  But nothing of it was ever written.  Until the work was actually begun, even the framework upon which it was to be shaped remained in his mind, and the copious marks in his books of reference were the mere guide-posts to a strong memory, which retained not words and phrases, but salient facts and the knowledge of where to find them again.