iv MODERN EVOLUTION 197 



But the disciple soon outstripped the master. 

 As was said of Erasmus in relation to Luther, 

 Huxley hatched the egg that Darwin laid. For in 

 the Origin of Species the theory was not pushed to 

 its obvious conclusion : Darwin only hinted that it 

 ' would throw much light on the origin of man and 

 his history.' His silence, as he candidly tells us in 

 the Introduction to the Descent of Man, was due to 

 a desire * not to add to the prejudices against his 

 views.' No such hesitancy kept Huxley silent. In 

 the spirit of Plato's Laws, he followed the argu- 

 ment whithersoever it led. In 1860 he delivered 

 a course of lectures to working-men ' On the Rela- 

 tions of Man to the Lower Animals,' and in 1862, 

 a couple of lectures on the same subject at the 

 Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. The important 

 and significant feature of these discourses was the 

 demonstration that no cerebral barrier divides man 

 from apes ; that the attempt to draw a psychical 

 distinction between him and the lower animals is 

 futile ; and that ' even the highest faculties of feeling 

 and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms 

 of life.' The lectures were published in 1863 i n a 

 volume entitled Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature; 

 and it was with pride warranted by the results of 

 subsequent researches that Huxley, in a letter to 

 the present writer, thus refers to the book when ar- 

 ranging for its reissue among the Collected Essays: 



I was looking through Man's Place in Nature the other 

 day. I do not think there is a word I need delete, nor 

 anything I need add, except in confirmation and extension 

 of the doctrine there laid down. That is great good fortune 

 for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd 



