178 EVOLUTION [CHAP. Ill 



Letter 119 complete and awful smasher (and done like a " buttered angel ") 

 it is for Owen ! What a humbug he is to have left out 

 the sentence in the lecture before the orthodox Cambridge 

 dons ! I like Lubbock's paper very much : how well he 

 writes. 1 M'Donnell, of course, pleases me greatly. But I 

 am very curious to know who wrote the Protozoa article : 

 I shall hear, if it be not a secret, from Lubbock. It strikes 

 me as very good, and, by Jove, how Owen is shown up " this 

 great and sound reasoner " ! By the way, this reminds me of 

 a passage which I have just observed in Owen's address at 

 Leeds, which a clever reviewer might turn into good fun. 

 He defines (p. xc) and further on amplifies his definition 

 that creation means " a process he knows not what." And in 

 a previous sentence he says facts shake his confidence that 

 the Apteryx in New Zealand and Red Grouse in England are 

 " distinct creations." So that he has no confidence that these 

 birds were produced by " processes he knows not what ! ' 



To what miserable inconsistencies and rubbish this truckling 



t> 



to opposite opinions leads the great generaliser ! 2 



Farewell : I heartily rejoice in the clear merit of this 

 number. I hope Mrs. Huxley goes on well. Etty keeps 

 much the same, but has not got up to the same pitch as when 

 you were here. Farewell. 



1 86 1, p. 67. It was Mr. Huxley's vindication of the unqualified contra- 

 diction ;;iven by him at the Oxford meeting of the British Association 

 to Professor Owen's assertions as to the difference between the brains 

 of man and the higher apes. The sentence omitted by Owen in his 

 lecture before the University of Cambridge was a footnote on the close 

 structural resemblance between Homo and Pithccus, which occurs in his 

 paper on the characters of the class Mammalia in the Linn. Soc. Journal, 

 Vol. II., 1857, p. 20. According to Huxley the lecture, or " Essay on the 

 Classification of the Mammalia," was, with this omission, a reprint of the 

 Linnean paper. In Marts Place in Nature, p. no, note, Huxley remarks : 

 " Surely it is a little singular that the ' anatomist,' who finds it ' difficult ' 

 to 'determine the difference' between Homo and Pithecus, should yet 

 range them, on anatomical grounds, in distinct sub-classes." 



1 Sir John Lubbock's paper was a review of Leydig on the Daphniidas. 

 M'DonnelPs was " On the Homologies of the Electric Organ of the 

 Torpedo," afterwards used in the Origin (see Ed. vi., p. 150). 



2 In the " Historical Sketch," which forms part of the later editions of 

 the Origin, Mr. Darwin made use of Owen's Leeds Address ip the manner 

 sketched above. See Origin, Ed. VI., p. xvii, 



