CHAPTEE XXX 



1860-1865 : PERSONAL 



SINCE his intervention at the Oxford meeting of the British 

 Association in 1860, Hooker was not directly concerned in 

 several bitter controversies which took place during this period, 

 either in attack or defence, though he followed them closely. 

 There was the battle of the brains, human and simian, where 

 Huxley, supported by other anatomists, fulfilled his pledge 

 made at the Oxford meeting to demonstrate the baselessness 

 of Owen's assertions, finally summing up the case in his little 

 book ' Man's Place in Nature ' (1863). There was Owen's 

 attack on Lyell and Lyell's conversion to Darwinism, under 

 cover of a review of ' The Antiquity of Man ' (1863 see C:D; 

 in. 7 seq. ; M.L. i. 238-9). There was the AthencBum review 

 (March 28, 1863) of Dr. Carpenter's * Introduction to the 

 Study of the Foraminifera,' celebrated as having provoked 

 Darwin for the first and, save once only, the last time in his life, 

 to reply on a scientific question in a popular journal. Carpenter 

 had referred to living and extinct Foraminifera as having a 

 common ancestry ; the reviewer took the opportunity of 

 denouncing his Darwinian tendencies and Darwinism itself, 

 propounding instead a wonderful theory of spontaneous 

 generation (Heterogeny): * Who would ever have thought of 

 the old stupid Athenaeum taking to Oken-like transcendental 

 philosophy written in Owenian style ! ' * exclaimed Darwin to 



1 Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), Professor of Natural Science at Jena, Munich, 

 and Zurich successively, set out to deduce all knowledge from certain a priori 

 principles, especially of parallelism between the universal and the particular. 

 Thus, as there are five senses in the perfect animal, so there are five main classes 

 of animals each representing the special development of one of the senses and 

 in the individual the head is in essence the repetition of the trunk. 



Though experiment afterwards gave science something not utterly unlike 

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