PREFACE. Xlll 



declaring that "his intellect had no 

 superior." Although comparisons are pro- 

 verbially odious, many cultured persons 

 would prefer the opinion of Professor 

 Owen, the first scientist of the present 

 time, when he pronounced the celebrated 

 French Naturalist Cuvier "the greatest 

 man since Aristotle, not to be. repeated for 

 2000 years." * And when Professor 

 Huxley speaks of Darwin's unproved 

 theoretic conception of man having been 

 evolved from the larvae of an ascidian 

 tadpole as " an established truth,"f or as 

 Mr. Ball, J the Astronomer Royal for 

 Ireland, calls it, "a necessary truth," I am 

 reminded that Professor Huxley's opinions 

 are somewhat unstable on this subject, as 



continually made to depend on the force of the word 

 " probable." And Aristotle in his Poetics says 

 " This, too, is probable, according to a saying of 

 Agathon : 'It is a part of probability that many 

 improbable things will happen/ " 



* Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox, vol. i., pp. 

 261, 262. 



f Huxley's Lay Sermons, p. 295. 



\ Article in Longman's Magazine, Nov. 1883, p. 77. 



