PREFACE. 5 



history be called my own, and for a like reason. Nevertheless, 

 as I also say, I had such consciousness of honest work in either 

 respect, that I could not help allowing myself a certain satisfac- 

 tion in both. The grounds, more especially for this as regards 

 the history the summaries I dismiss for the present lay as 

 well in the pains that still throbbed before consciousness, as in 

 the fact that the narrative involved was known to me to be then 

 only for the first time presented in English.* I fancied, indeed, 

 that Mr Huxley himself would applaud here, for I believed him 

 partial to a scientific historiette. Had I but known that he had 

 in petto a rival history 1 I confess I had no anticipations of this : 

 and, as to that indeed, perhaps he had it not in petto. Perhaps 

 Mr Huxley has only benevolently got it up since for my correc- 

 tion by example of him ? There at least it is my historiette is 

 a " travesty," it seems, and Mr Huxley, in the pages of the 

 Contemporary Review, replaces it by his. Loudly! Ay, Mr 

 Huxley, I venture to say, is not less loud here than the legitimate 

 blind beggar whom Mr Home represents to abuse the interlop- 

 ing one thus : 



" I am the genuine blind man, 

 That villain seeks to grind one, 



And poach one's field ; 



But I'll not yield, 

 What ! leave old rights behind one ! 



" / am the real blind man, 

 The genuine real blind man ! 



As for that thief 



With eyes, may grief 

 Consume him ! / am the blind man !" 



But it will be only fair to Mr Huxley that the readers of the 

 present essay should see his objections to it in his own words. 

 The yeast-organism affording him an exceedingly eligible start- 

 ing-ground for his lively representative ways, Mr Huxley begins 

 with it, and is thereby enabled to give a little, not unwelcome, 

 additional show of bulk to after all the somewhat scanty 

 historical forces he has only desperately driven together. With 

 these skilful preliminary dispositions, the attack itself and in 

 its entirety is this : 



" Dr Stirling, for example, made my essay the subject of a 



* By way of indirect testimony here, let me refer to an eminent physiological Pro- 

 fessor who, on a late occasion, speaking of protoplasm, before the British Association, 

 displayed this severe impartiality between us that, while he gave my account of proto- 

 plasm, it was Mr Huxley alone he named / 



