so FIFTY YEARS OF DARWINISM 



unwilling ; Hooker in England and Asa Gray in 

 America were the two intimate friends on whom 

 he chiefly depended for help in writing the Origin 

 and for support to its arguments; Huxley was 

 the great general in the field where religious con- 

 victions, expressed or unexpressed, were the 

 foundation of a fierce and bitter antagonism. 



THE ATTACKS OF EICHARD OWEN AND 

 ST. GEORGE MIVAET 



An unnecessary bitterness was imported into 

 the early controversies in England, because of 

 the personahty of the scientific leaders in the 

 attacks on the Origin. Of these the chief was 

 the great comparative anatomist, Richard Owen. 

 In spite of his leading scientific position, this re- 

 markable man withdrew from contact with his 

 brother zoologists, living in a self-imposed isola- 

 tion which tended towards envy and bitterness. 

 The same unavaihng detachment had been car- 

 ried 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 ab- 

 sorbed and jealous interest. Professor 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 



