Mr. Herbert Spencer 45 
to “ have formed the backbone,” &c., and ought “ to have 
been elaborately stated,” &c., but when I wrote “ Life and 
Habit ” neither Mr Romanes nor any one else understood 
it to have been even glanced at by more than a very few, 
and as for having been “ elaborately stated,” it had been 
stated by Professor Hering as elaborately as it could be 
stated within the limits of an address of only twenty-two 
pages, but with this exception it had never been stated at 
all. It is not too much to say that ‘“ Life and Habit,” 
when it first came out, was considered so startling a paradox 
that people would not believe in my desire to be taken 
seriously, or at any rate were able to pretend that they 
thought I was not writing seriously. 
Mr. Romanes knows this just as well as all must do who 
keep an eye on evolution ; he himself, indeed, had said 
(Nature, January 27, 1881) that so long as I “ aimed only 
at entertaining ’’ my “ readers by such works as ‘ Erewhon’ 
and ‘ Life and Habit’ ” (as though these books were of 
kindred character) I was in my proper sphere. It would be 
doing too little credit to Mr. Romanes’ intelligence to suppose 
him not to have known when he said this that “ Life and 
Habit ’ was written as seriously as my subsequent books 
on evolution, but it suited him at the moment to join those 
who professed to consider it another book of paradoxes 
such as, I suppose, “‘ Erewhon ” had been, so he classed the 
two together. He could not have done this unless enough 
people thought, or said they thought, the books akin, to 
give colour to his doing so. 
. One alone of all my reviewers has, to my knowledge, 
brought Mr. Spencer against me. This was a writer in the 
St. James’s Gazette (December 2, 1880). I challenged him 
in a letter which appeared (December 8, 1880), and said, 
“I would ask your reviewer to be kind enough to refer 
your readers to those passages of Mr. Spencer's “ Principles 
of Psychology ” which in any direct intelligible way refer 
the phenomena of instinct and heredity generally, to 
