4 PREFACE. 



enough. If the question involves at bottom logical issues, it 

 has been really addressed by Mr Huxley to physiological ones ; 

 and it is only in the interest of scientific accuracy to point out 

 that the inference to a physiological identity has been attempted 

 to be made good by Mr Huxley, solely through means of an 

 unwarrantable trampling out of (perhaps, for the moment, in- 

 voluntary blindness to) the most essential physiological differ- 

 ences. For example, if you identify all life in protoplasm, the 

 counter-reminder is only fair that you must equally differentiate 

 all life in protoplasms; for of no one living thing, and of the 

 organs of no one living thing, is the protoplasm interchangeable 

 with that of another ; and this involves, instead of Mr Huxley's 

 universal identity in power, in form, and in substance, infinite 

 difference in all these respects. 



In the statement of this difference which is really a veritable 

 scientific interest I was led into a variety of expositions, and, 

 among these, into an historical one. So far, now, as it was 

 history that was concerned in this, I could not, of course, in one 

 way, take any credit to myself; still it was precisely here that, in 

 another way, I did think I might take some little credit to 

 myself. If in the course of the essay, indeed, there was any- 

 thing else that seemed to me similarly situated, it was the 

 summaries the summaries of Mr Huxley's views, namely, with 

 which I always prefaced my criticism of these. I confess that I 

 thought them exact short, that is, to the shortest, but full to 

 the fullest, and certainly fair to the fairest, if not also clear to 

 the clearest. It has pleased Mr Huxley, however, rudely to 

 shock my not immoderate complacency in both respects. 

 Neither history nor summaries, it seems, can he regard with 

 satisfaction. That is, it was alone for what was not mine in the 

 whole essay that I allowed myself to take any credit as mine, 

 and this Mr Huxley denies me. In the reply, namely, to which, 

 after two years' interval, he has at length brought himself, it 

 has pleased Mr Huxley in those few sour-humoured words of 

 his in the Contemporary Review for December 1871 to call the 

 history a " travesty," and (by implication) the summaries " utter 

 misrepresentations." That Mr Huxley, fairly looking at either 

 history or summaries, should yet feel himself free to speak so, 

 throws me back I confess it on thoughts of him. 



If, as I say, the summaries could not, as wholly referring to 

 the matter of another, be called my own, so neither could the 



