After all possible trimming and compression, he still feared the lecture would be too long, and would take more than an hour to deliver, especially if the audience was likely to be large, for the numbers must be considered in reference to the speed of speaking.  But he had taken even more pains than usual with it.] “The Lecture,” [he writes to Professor Romanes on April 19], “has been in type for weeks, if not months, as I have been taking an immensity of trouble over it.  And I can judge of nothing till it is in type.” [But this very precaution led to unexpected complications.  When the proposition to lecture was first made to him, he was not sent a copy of the statute ordering that publication in the first instance should lie with the University Press; and in view of the proviso that “the Lecturer is free to publish on his own behalf in any other form he may like,” he had taken Professor Romanes’ original reference to publication by the Press to be a subsidiary request to which he gladly assented.  However, a satisfactory arrangement was speedily arrived at with the publishers; Huxley remarking:—­]

All I have to say is, do not let the University be in any way a loser by the change.  If the V.-C. thinks there is any risk of this, I will gladly add to what Macmillan pays.  That matter can be settled between us.

[However, he had not forgotten the limitation of his subject in respect of religion and politics, and he repeatedly refers to his careful avoidance of these topics as an “egg-dance.”  And wishing to reassure Mr. Romanes on this head, he writes on April 22:—­]

There is no allusion to politics in my lecture, nor to any religion except Buddhism, and only to the speculative and ethical side of that.  If people apply anything I say about these matters to modern philosophies, except evolutionary speculation, and religions, that is not my affair.  To be honest, however, unless I thought they would, I should never have taken all the pains I have bestowed on these 36 pages.

[But these words conjured up terrible possibilities, and Mr. Romanes wrote back in great alarm to ask the exact state of the case.  The two following letters show that the alarm was groundless:—­]

Hodeslea, April 26, 1893.

My dear Romanes,

I fear, or rather hope, that I have given you a very unnecessary scare.

You may be quite sure, I think, that, while I should have refused to give the lecture if any pledge of a special character had been proposed to me, I have felt very strongly bound to you to take the utmost care that no shadow of a just cause for offence should be given, even to the most orthodox of Dons.

It seems to me that the best thing I can do is to send you the lecture as it stands, notes and all.  But please return it within two days at furthest, and consider it strictly confidential between us two (I am not excluding Mrs. Romanes, if she cares to look at the paper).  No consideration would induce me to give any ground for the notion that I had submitted the lecture to any one but yourself.