i862 EDINBURGH LECTURES ON MAN 



207 



Some think my winding-up too strong, but I trust the day will j 

 never come when I shall abstain from expressing my contempt 

 for those who prostitute Science to the Service of Error. At 

 anyrate I am not old enough for that yet. Darwin came in 

 just now. I get no scoldings for pitching into the common 

 enemy now ! ! 



I Vi'ould give you fifty guesses (he writes to Hooker on 

 April 30), and you should not find out the author of the Punch 

 poem. I saw it in MS. three weeks ago, and was told the author 

 was a friend of mine. But I remained hopelessly in the dark 

 till yesterday. What do you say to Sir Philip Egerton coming 

 out in that line? I am told he is the author, and the fact 

 speaks volumes for Owen's perfect success in damning himself. 



In the midst of the fight came a surprising invitation. 

 On April 10 he writ«s to his wife : — 



They have written to me from the Philosophical Institute 

 of Edinburgh to ask me to give two lectures on the " Relation of 

 Man to the Lower Animals " next session. I have replied that 

 if they can give me January 3 and 7 for lecture days I will do it 

 — if not, not. Fancy unco guid Edinburgh requiring illumina- 

 tion on the subject ! They know my views, so if they do not 

 Hke what I shall have to tell them, it is their own fault. 



These lectures were eventually delivered on January 4 

 and 7, 1862, and were well reported in the Edinburgh pa- 

 pers. The substance of them appears as Part 2 in Man's 

 Place in Nature, the first lecture describing the general 

 nature of the process of development among vertebrate 

 animals, and the modifications of the skeleton in the mam- 

 malia; the second dealing with the crucial points of com- 

 parison between the higher apes and man, viz. the hand, 

 foot, and brain. He showed that the differences between 

 man and the higher apes were no greater than those be- 

 tween the higher and lower apes. If the Darwinian hy- 

 pothesis explained the common ancestry of the latter, the 

 anatomist would have no difficulty with the origin of man, 

 so far as regards the gap between him and the higher apes. 



Yet, though convinced that " that hypothesis is as near 

 an approximation to the truth as, for example, the Coper- 

 nican hypothesis was to the true theory of the planetary 



