Ever yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[The success of "Man's Place" was immediate, despite such criticisms as that of the "Athenaeum" that "Lyell's object is to make man old, Huxley's to degrade him." By the middle of February it reached its second thousand; in July it is heard of as republished in America; at the same time L. Buchner writes that he wished to translate it into German, but finds himself forestalled by Victor Carus. From another aspect, Lord Enniskillen, thanking him for the book, says (March 3), "I believe you are already excommunicated by book, bell, and candle," while in an undated note, Bollaert writes, "The Bishop of Oxford the other day spoke about 'the church having been in danger of late, by such books as Colenso's, but that it (the church) was now restored.' And this at a time, he might have added, when the works of Darwin, Lyell, and Huxley are torn from the hands of Mudie's shopmen, as if they were novels—(see "Daily Telegraph," April 10)."
At the same time, the impression left by his work upon the minds of the leading men of science may be judged from a few words of Sir Charles Lyell, who writes to a friend on March 15, 1863 ("Life and Letters" 2 366):—
Huxley's second thousand is going off well. If he had leisure like you and me, and the vigour and logic of the lectures, and his address to the Geological Society, and half a dozen other recent works (letters to the "Times" on Darwin, etc.), had been all in one book, what a position he would occupy! I entreated him not to undertake the "Natural History Review" before it began. The responsibility all falls on the man of chief energy and talent; it is a quarterly mischief, and will end in knocking him up.
A similar estimate appears from an earlier letter of March 11, 1859
("Life and Letters" 2 321), when he quotes Huxley's opinion of Mansel's
Bampton Lectures on the "Limits of Religious Thought":—
A friend of mine, Huxley, who will soon take rank as one of the first naturalists we have ever produced, begged me to read these sermons as first rate,] "although, regarding the author as a churchman, you will probably compare him, as I did, to the drunken fellow in Hogarth's contested election, who is sawing through the signpost at the other party's public-house, forgetting he is sitting at the other end of it. But read them as a piece of clear and unanswerable reasoning."
[In the 1894 preface to the re-issue of "Man's Place" in the Collected Essays, Huxley speaks as follows of the warnings he received against publishing on so dangerous a topic, of the storm which broke upon his head, and the small result which, in the long run, it produced (In September 1887 he wrote to Mr. Edward Clodd—]"All the propositions laid down in the wicked book, which was so well anathematised a quarter of a century ago, are now taught in the text-books. What a droll world it is!"):—
Magna est veritas et praevalebit! Truth is great, certainly, but considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing. When, towards the end of 1862, I had finished writing "Man's Place in Nature," I could say with a good conscience that my conclusions "had not been formed hastily or enunciated crudely." I thought I had earned the right to publish them, and even fancied I might be thanked rather than reproved for doing so. However, in my anxiety to publish nothing erroneous, I asked a highly competent anatomist and very good friend of mine to look through my proofs, and, if he could, point out any errors of fact. I was well pleased when he returned them without criticism on that score; but my satisfaction was speedily dashed by the very earnest warning as to the consequences of publication, which my friend's interest in my welfare led him to give. But, as I have confessed elsewhere, when I was a young man, there was just a little—a mere soupcon—in my composition of that tenacity of purpose which has another name; and I felt sure that all the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to me as the giving up that which I had resolved to do, upon grounds which I conceived to be right. [(As to this advice not to publish "Man's Place" for fear of misrepresentation on the score of morals, he said, in criticising an attack of this sort made upon Darwin in the "Quarterly" for July 1876:—] "It seemed to me, however, that a man of science has no raison d'etre at all, unless he is willing to face much greater risks than these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for much—that they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of letters, for example.") So the book came out; and I must do my friend the justice to say that his forecast was completely justified. The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation and ridicule for some years, and I was even as one of the wicked. Indeed, it surprises me at times to think how anyone who had sunk so low could since have emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability. Personally, like the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I did not feel "one penny the worse." Translated into several languages, the book reached a wider public than I had ever hoped for; being largely helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine advertisements to which I referred. It has had the honour of being freely utilised without acknowledgment by writers of repute; and finally it achieved the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten.
To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed during the last thirty years. I doubt not that there are truths as plainly obvious and as generally denied as those contained in "Man's Place in Nature," now awaiting enunciation. If there is a young man of the present generation who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. Veritas praevalebit—some day; and even if she does not prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and wiser for having tried to help her. And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and pains.