250 THE SPEEAD OF EVOLUTION. [Ch. XIV. 



before) as all the world seems to be in with respect to free will, 

 yet with everything supposed to have been foreseen or pre- 

 ordained." 



The shape of his nose would perhaps not have been used as 

 an illustration, if he had remembered Fitz-Koy's objection to that 

 feature (see Autobiography, p. 26). He should, too, have re- 

 membered the difficulty of predicting the value to an organism 

 of an apparently unimportant character. 



In England Professor Huxley was at work in the evolutionary 

 cause. He gave, in 1862, two lectures at Edinburgh on Mans 

 Place in Nature. My father wrote : — 



" I am heartily glad of your success in the North. By 

 Jove, you have attacked Bigotry in its stronghold. I thought 

 you would have been mobbed. I am so glad that you will 

 publish your Lectures. You seem to have kept a due medium 

 between extreme boldness and caution. I am heartily glad that 

 all went off so well." 



A review,* by F. W. Hutton, afterwards Professor of Biology 

 and Geology at Canterbury, N. Z., gave a hopeful note of 

 the time not far off when a broader view of the argument 

 for Evolution would be accepted. My father wrote to the 

 author | : — 



Down, April 20th, 1861. 



Deab Sir, — I hope that you will permit me to thank you for 

 sending me a copy of your paper in the Geologist, and at the 

 same time to express my opinion that you have done the subject 

 a real service by the highly original, striking, and condensed 

 manner with which you have put the case. I am actually 

 weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce direct 

 evidence of one species changing into another, but that I believe 

 that this view in the main is correct, because so many phenomena 

 can be thus grouped together and explained. 



But it is generally of no use, I cannot make persons see this. 

 I generally throw in their teeth the universally admitted theory 

 of the undulations of light — neither the undulations, nor the 

 very existence of ether being proved — yet admitted because the 

 view explains so much. You are one of the very few who have 

 seen this, and have now put it most forcibly and clearly. I am 

 much pleased to see how carefully you have read my book, and 

 what is far more important, reflected on so many points with an 

 independent spirit. As I am deeply interested in the subject 



* Geologist, 1861, p. 132. 



t The letter is published in a lecture by Professor Hutton given before 

 the Philosophy Institute, Canterbury, N.Z., Sept. 12th, 1887. 



