294 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XV 



publish them, and even fancied I might be thanked 

 rather than reproved for doing so. However, in my 

 anxiety to publish nothing erroneous, I asked a highly 

 competent anatomist and very good friend of mine to look 

 through my proofs, and, if he could, point out any errors 

 of fact I was well pleased when he returned them with- 

 out criticism on that score ; but my satisfaction was 

 speedily dashed by the very earnest warning as to the 

 consequences of publication, which my friend's interest in 

 my welfare led him to give. But, as I have confessed 

 elsewhere, when I was a young man, there was just a 

 little a mere sotp$on in my composition of that tenacity 

 of purpose which has another name ; and I felt sure that 

 all the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to 

 me as the giving up that which I had resolved to do, 

 upon grounds which I conceived to be right. 1 So the 

 book came out ; and I must do my friend the justice to 

 say that his forecast was completely justified. The Boreas 

 of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation 

 and ridicule for some years, and I was even as one of the 

 wicked. Indeed, it surprises me at times to think how 

 any one who had sunk so low could since have emerged 

 into, at any rate, relative respectability. Personally, like 

 the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I did 

 not feel " one penny the worse." Translated into several 

 languages, the book reached a wider public than I had 

 ever hoped for ; being largely helped, I imagine, by the 

 Ernulphine advertisements to which I referred. It has 

 had the honour of being freely utilised without acknow- 



1 As to this advice not to publish Man's Place for fear of mis- 

 representation on the score of morals, he said, in criticising an 

 attack of this sort made upon Darwin in the Quarterly for July 

 1876 : " It seemed to me, however, that a man of science has no 

 raison d'etre at all, unless he is willing to face much greater risks 

 than these for the sake of that which he believes to be true ; and 

 further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for much 

 that they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of 

 letters, for example." 



