EVOLUTIONARY LECTURES 59 



good metaphysician (of that I know nothing, don't despise 

 me), but you have neither time nor place for both " (Life, i, 

 p. 229). 



There is, however, no doubt as to the " good natura- 

 list," but regarding the rest opinion would scarcely be 

 unanimous. 



Much of the work of 186 1 naturally had reference to 

 evolution, whether by way of exposition or in the form 

 of research lending support to Darwin's views. 



In the early part of the year he lectured to working- 

 men on " The Relation of Man to the rest of the Animal 

 Kingdom," a subject to which he had for some time 

 devoted special attention, and which was naturally the 

 central point about which the controversial war waged 

 most bitterly. On this particular audience he obviously 

 made a deep impression, and humorously remarks in a 

 letter to his wife — " By next Friday evening they will all 

 be convinced that they are monkeys" (Life, i, p. 190). 



Two lectures, included in his published works, come 

 under the pro-Darwinian utterances. One was a Friday 

 Evening Discourse (February 8) at the Royal Institution, 

 " On the Nature of the Earliest Stages of the Develop- 

 ment of Animals" (Proc. Roy. Inst., iii, 1858-62, 

 PP- 3i5"7- Sci. Mem., ii, xx, p. 400). — Taking the 

 development of the free-swimming colonial ascidian Pyro- 

 soma as a text {cf. p. 49), the early evolution of the 

 individual is described, and shown to be a matter of 

 gradual up-building, step by step (epigenesis), a passage 

 from simple to complex, and not a mere increase in size 

 (evolution in the older sense). In short, the discourse 

 illustrates the principles of development first laid down 

 by Caspar Friedrich Wolff {cf. p. 42). 



The second lecture, delivered at South Kensington, 

 was entitled, "A Lobster: or the Study of Zoology" 



