l863 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE 



219 



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 ridi- 

 cule for some years, and I was even as one of the wicked. In- 

 deed, it surprises me at times to think how anyone 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 acknowledgment 

 by writers of repute ; and finally it achieved the fate, which is 

 . the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the 

 rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten. 



To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed 

 during the last thirty years. I doubt not that there are truths as 

 plainly obvious and as generally denied as those contained in 

 Man's Place in Nature, now awaiting enunciation. If there is 

 a young man of the present generation who has taken as much 

 trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him 

 come out with them, without troubling his head about the bark- 

 ing of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. Veritas pravalebit — some 

 day; and even if she does not prevail in his time, he himself 

 will be all the better and wiser for having tried to help her. And 

 let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for all 

 his labour and pains. 



The following letter refers to the newly published Man's 

 Place in Nature. Miss H. Darwin had suggested a couple 

 of corrections : — 



Jermyn Street, Eeli. 25, 1863. 



My dear Darwin — Please to say to Miss Henrietta Minos 

 Rhadamanthus Darwin that I plead guilty to the justice of both 

 criticisms, and throw myself on the mercy of the court. 



As extenuating circumstances with respect to indictment 

 No. I, see prefatory notice. Extenuating circumstance No. 2 



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." 



