Footnotes
[16] “The doctrine preached by Weismann was that to start with the body and inquire how its characters got into the germ was to view the sequence from the wrong end; the proper starting point was the germ, and the real question was not ‘How do the characters of the organism get into the germ-cell which it produces?’ but ‘How are the characters of an organism represented in the germ which produces it?’ Or, as Samuel Butler has it, the proper statement of the relation between successive generations is not to say that a hen produces another hen through the medium of an egg, but to say that a hen is merely an egg’s way of producing another egg.” Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery, by A. D. Darbishire. Cassell & Co., 1911, p. 187–8.
“It has, I believe, been often remarked that a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” Life and Habit, Trübner & Co., 1878, chapter viii, p. 134.
And compare the idea underlying “The World of the Unborn” in Erewhon.
[26] The two chapters entitled “The Rights of Animals” and “The Rights of Vegetables” appeared first in the new and revised edition of Erewhon 1901 and form part of the additions referred to in the preface to that book.
[30] On the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this—
It wounds thine honour that I speak it now—
Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank’d not.—Ant. & Cleop., I. iv. 66–71.
[31] Walks in the Regions of Science and Faith, by Harvey Goodwin, D.D., Lord Bishop of Carlisle. John Murray, 1883.
[32a] This quotation occurs on the title page of Charles Dickens and Rochester by Robert Langton. Chapman & Hall, 1880. Reprinted with additions from the Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, Vol. VI, 1880. But the italics are Butler’s.
[32b] This is Butler’s note as he left it. He made it just about the time he hit upon the theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman. If it had caught his eye after that theory had become established in his mind, he would have edited it so as to avoid speaking of Homer as the author of the poem.
[41] Life and Habit is dated 1878, but it actually appeared on Butler’s birthday, 4th December, 1877.