The truth is that Huxley’s strongly emotional and highly pugnacious nature was held back by certain wholly non-logical influences from accepting an hypothesis for which the evidence was practically as potent for over a decade before he accepted it as it was at the time of his conversion. The book was written in a somewhat exuberant and rhetorical style. With all its religious heterodoxy, it was characterised by a certain pious and edifying tone, and was given to abrupt transitions from scientific reasoning to mystical sentiment. It contained numerous blunders in matters of biological and geological detail; and its author inclined to believe, on the basis of some rather absurd experimental evidence, in the possibility of spontaneous generation. All these things were offensive to the professional standards of an enthusiastic young naturalist, scrupulous about the rigour of the game, intolerant of vagueness and of any mixture of the romantic imagination with scientific inquiry.... He therefore, in 1854, almost outdid the _Edinburgh Review_ in the ferocity of his onslaught upon the layman who had ventured to put forward sweeping generalisations upon biological questions while capable of errors upon particular points which were palpable to every competent specialist. Huxley refers to this review as “the only review I ever have had qualms of conscience about, on the grounds of needless savagery.” Darwin more mildly described it as “rather hard on the poor author.” Indeed, he confessed to a certain sympathy with the _Vestiges_; while Wallace, in 1845, expressed a very favourable opinion of the book, describing it as “an ingenious hypothesis, strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies.” The strongest testimony to the value of Chambers’s work is that of Mr. A. W. Benn, who writes in _Modern England_, 1908, concerning the _Vestiges_:— Hardly any advance has since been made on Chambers’s general arguments, which at the time they appeared would have been accepted as convincing, but for theological truculence and scientific timidity. And Chambers himself only gave unity to thoughts already in wide circulation.... Chambers was not a scientific expert, nor altogether an original thinker; but he had studied scientific literature to better purpose than any professor.... The considerations that now recommend evolution to popular audiences are no other than those urged in the _Vestiges_. [Sidenote: =Herbert Spencer.=] The next great name among the pre-Darwinian evolutionists is that of Herbert Spencer. About 1850 he wrote:—