THE ATTACKS OF OWEN 27 



tion which tended towards envy and bitterness. 

 The same unavailing detachment had been 

 carried much further by the great naturalist 

 W. J. Burchell, who, as from a watch-tower, 

 looked upon the world he strove to avoid with an 

 absorbed and jealous interest. Prof. J. M. Baldwin 

 has shown how inevitable and inexorable is the 

 grip of the social environment : the more we 

 attempt to evade it, the more firmly we seem to 

 be held in its grasp. 



In the first years of the struggle, Owen's bitter 

 antagonism made itself felt in the part he took as 

 ' crammer ' to the Bishop of Oxford, and in his 

 anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review for 

 April, 1860. But Owen could not bear to remain 

 apart from the stream of thought when there was 

 no doubt about the way it was flowing, so that in 

 a few years he was maintaining some of the chief 

 conclusions of the Origin, although retracting 

 nothing, but rather keeping up a bitter attack 

 upon Darwin, This treatment received from one 

 who was all affability when they met,^ was natu- 

 rally resented by Darwin, whose feelings on the 

 subject are expressed in the following passage 

 from a letter to Asa Gray, July 23, 1862. 



* By the way, one of my chief enemies (the sole one who 

 has annoyed me), namely Owen, I hear has been lecturing on 

 birds ; and admits that all have descended from one, and 

 advances as his own idea that the oceanic wingless birds 



' ' Mrs. Carlyle said that Owen's sweetness always reminded her 

 of sugar of lead.' Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley, London, ii. 167. 



