LYELL AND THE POSITION OF MAN 33 



life is a curse to him and more than half his days and weeks 

 are spent in inaction in forced idleness of mind and body. 



The following is apropos of Huxley's book above mentioned 

 on * The Eelation of Man to the Lower Animals.' 



To T. H. Huxley 



Kew : Friday. 



I am making a precis of our poor German collector, 

 G. Mann's, West African letters, to contradict Burton's 

 assertions, and have come across a passage that will amuse 

 you. Talking of the Gaboon natives, he says, ' They 

 generally w r ere touching my beard and hair, lifting my hat to 

 see if the whole head was covered with the same hair, and 

 found it as they said, very strange that I had hair like the 

 Monkeys and not like mankind. 1 



So you see there are two opinions as to the value of the 

 similarity between men and monkeys. I do not think this 

 would have struck any but a nigger looking from a Nigger's 

 point of view. I wonder what the Monkeys find. 



As to Lyell's book itself, he agreed with Darwin's verdict 

 as to the excellence of the Glacial chapters, the force of the 

 aggregation of evidence as to the origin of Man, and the skill in 

 picking out salient points in the argument for change of species, 

 combined with disappointment at the timidity which prevented 

 him from giving any judgment of his own on the materials set 

 forth. 



In a letter to Darwin of March 15, 1863, he writes : 



I have been having a long correspondence with Lyell, and 

 have given him quite as deflagrating a yarn as I sent you, 

 and likened him to the Theologians ! adding, that I had always 

 hitherto classed him as the sole sexagenarian philosopher 

 who could change his opinion on good ground. He proposes 

 some alterations of the two obnoxious passages, which will 

 at any rate do justice to the hypothesis as he states it, which 

 the former ones did not. Lyell dwells, and with reason, 

 on the fact that he makes as many converts whether he 

 withholds or gives his own opinion. I tell him perhaps 

 more, as people like to draw their own inferences, but that 

 is not the particular point we as his friends now look to. 



