246 EVOLUTION [CHAP. IV 



Letter 174 end your admirable work on metamorphosis. 1 How well you 

 are acquainted with the works of English naturalists, and how 

 generously you bestow honour on them ! Mr. Lubbock is my 

 neighbour, and I have known him since he was a little boy ; 

 he is in every way a thoroughly good man ; as is my friend 

 Huxley. It gave me real pleasure to see you notice their 

 works as vou have done. 







Letter 175 To T - H - Huxley. 



Down, April nth [1864]. 



I am very much obliged for your present of your Comp. 

 Anatomy? When strong enough I am sure I shall read it 

 with greatest interest. I could not resist the last chapter, of 

 which I have read a part, and have been much interested 

 about the " inspired idiot." 3 If Owen wrote the article 

 " Oken " 4 and the French work on the Archetype (points you 



1 Probably Metamorphoses of Man and the Lower Animals. Trans- 

 lated by H. Lawson, 1864. 



2 Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy, 1864. 



3 In reference to Oken (op. cit., p. 282) Huxley says : " I must confess 

 I never read his works without thinking of the epithet of ' inspired idiot' 

 applied to our own Goldsmith." 



4 The article on Oken in the eighth edition of the Encyclopedia 



Britannica is signed " R. O." : Huxley wrote to Darwin (April iSth, 



1864), "There is not the smallest question that Owen wrote both the 



article 'Oken' and the Archetype Book" (Huxley's Life, I., p. 250). 



Mr. Huxley's statements amount to this : (i) Prof. Owen accuses Goethe 



of having in 1820 appropriated Oken's theory of the skull, and of having 



given an apocryphal account of how the idea occurred to himself in 1790. 



(2) In the same article, p. 502, Owen stated it to be questionable whether 



the discoverer of the true theory of the segmental constitution of the skull 



(i.e. himself) was excited to his labours, or " in any way influenced by the 



d priori guesses of Oken." On this Huxley writes, p. 288 : "But if he 



himself had not been in any way influenced by Oken, and if the Programm 



[of Oken] is a mere mass of ' a priori guesses,' how comes it that only 



three years before Mr. Owen could write thus ? ' Oken, ce genie profond 



et penetrant, fut le premier qui entrevit la verite, guide par 1'heureuse idee 



de 1'arrangement des os craniens en segments, comme ceux du rachis, 



appeles vertebres . . .' " Later on Owen wrote : " Cela servira pour 



exemple d'une examen scrupuleux des faits, d'une appreciation philoso- 



phique de leurs relations et analogies, etc." (From Principes d^Osteologie 



comparee, on Recherches sur F Archetype, etc., p. 155, 1855). (3) Finally 



Huxley says, p. 289, plainly : " The fact is that, so far from not having 



been 'in any way influenced' by Oken, Prof. Owen's own contributions 



to this question are the merest Okenism, remanie? 



