XXVIII] FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES 83 



new ones as nearly as possible the same shape, yet each one 

 made them differently, and some were so totally unlike that, 

 when placed side by side, no one would believe they could have 

 been made for the same mouth. My experience of modern 

 dentists is that they all want to improve upon nature, and care 

 nothing for the comfort of those who are to use the teeth. 



I will occupy the remainder of this chapter with a few par- 

 ticulars of my relations with persons of some eminence, but 

 with whom I had very few opportunities of personal intercourse. 



I made the acquaintance of Mr. Samuel Butler, the author 

 of Erewhon," through my friend Miss Buckley, at whose 

 father's house on Paddington Green I met him two or three 

 times. He was so good as to send me that wonderfully 

 clever and original book, and also his less known satirical 

 religious story, " The Fair Haven," which was reviewed with 

 approval by some of the Church newspapers as a genuine 

 piece of biography, which it purports to be. He also sent me 

 ''Life and Habit," and "Evolution Old and New," both of 

 which I reviewed in Nature in the year 1879. The former 

 is a wonderfully ingenious, brilliant, and witty application of 

 the theory of Haeckel and others, that every animal cell, or 

 even every organic molecule, is an independent conscious 

 organism, with its likes and dislikes, its habits and instincts 

 like the higher animals. He explains instincts as inherited 

 memories, which, at the time he wrote, was a permissible 

 hypothesis, but is now almost universally rejected as implying 

 the inheritance of acquired characters, which all the available 

 evidence is opposed to. The book, however, is well worth 

 reading for its extreme ingenuity, logical arrangement, and 

 all-pervading wit and humour. 



The other work is a very full and careful exposition of 

 the doctrines, as regards evolution, of Buffon, Lamarck, 

 Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Mr. Patrick Matthew, and some more 

 recent writers, with copious quotations from their works, and 

 an attempt to show not only that their views were of the same 

 general nature as those of Darwin, but were also of equal if 

 not greater importance. After reading the volume I wrote 



