and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." This is not the place to give a history of the criticisms and discussions which arose in regard to "The Origin of Species," especially as Darwin himself took no public part in them, except by the alterations made in successive editions. As indicating the tone of prominent critical organs, we may note that _The Athenæum_ (November 19, 1859) acknowledges there is something poetical in the theory. "If a monkey has become a man, what may not a man become?" Neither book, author, nor subject being ordinary, "the work deserves attention." _The Edinburgh Review_ considered that the author left the question very nearly where he found it. Failing to find original observations adequate even to give a colour to the hypothesis, the reviewer sought to find flaws in the author's mode of reasoning, and concluded that "we are called upon to accept a hypothesis on the plea of want of knowledge." Defective information, vagueness, and incompleteness are charged upon the man whom we now delight to honour; "intellectual husks," we are told; are all that he offers. Professor Huxley, who lectured at the Royal Institution, on February 10, 1860, on "Species and Races and their Origin," and brought forward Darwin's investigations as exemplifying that application of science to which England owes her greatness, was told that it more truly paralleled "the abuse of science to which a neighbouring nation--some seventy years since--owed its temporary degradation." And the professor was accused of audaciously seeking to blind his audience. Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford, was equally denunciatory in _The Quarterly_. He hopes that "this flimsy speculation" will be completely put down. "It is a dishonouring view of nature.... Under such influences," says the courtly bishop, "a man soon goes back to the marvelling stare of childhood at the centaurs and hippogriffs of fancy; or, if he is of a philosophic turn, he comes, like Oken, to write a scheme of creation under a 'sort of inspiration,' but it is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas. The whole world of nature is laid for such a man under a fantastic law of glamour, and he becomes capable of believing anything; and he is able, with a continually growing neglect of all the facts around him, with equal confidence and equal delusion, to look back to any past and to look on to any future."[11]