The story of the reception of the work is admirably told by Huxley in the chapter which he contributed to Darwin's Life and Letters, and it may be commended as useful reading to a generation which, drinking-in Darwinism from its birth, will not readily understand how such storm and outcry as rent the air, both in scientific as well as clerical quarters, could have been raised. "In fact," says Huxley, "the contrast between the present condition of public opinion upon the Darwinian question; between the estimation in which Darwin's views are now held in the scientific world; between the acquiescence, or, at least, quiescence, of the theologian of the self-respecting order at the present day, and the outburst of antagonism on all sides in 1858-59, when the new theory respecting the origin of species first became known to the older generation to which I belong, is so startling that, except for documentary evidence, I should be sometimes inclined to think my memories dreams." The like reflection arises when we consider the indifference with which books of the most daring and revolutionary character, both in theology and morals, are treated nowadays, in contrast to the uproar which greeted such a _brutum fulmen_ as Essays and Reviews. As for Colenso's Pentateuch, and books of its type, orthodoxy has long taken them to its bosom. So far as the larger number of naturalists, and of the intelligent public who followed their lead, were concerned, there was an absolutely open mind on the question of the mutation of species. There had been, as the foregoing sections of this book have shown, a long time of preparation and speculation. We certainly find the keynote of Evolution in Heraclitus, and more than two thousand years after his time Herbert Spencer, above all men, had removed it from the empirical stage, and placed it on a base broad as the facts which supported it. But it needed the leaven of the human and personal to stir it into life, and touch man in his various interests; and not all that Mr. Spencer had done in application of the theory of development to social questions and institutions could avail much till Darwin's theory gave it practical shape. Dissertations on the passage of the "homogeneous to the heterogeneous"; explanations of the theory of the evolution of complex sidereal systems out of diffused vapours of seemingly simple texture, interested people only in a vague and wondering fashion. But when Darwin illustrated the theory of the modification of life-forms by familiar examples gathered from his own experiments and observations, and from intercourse with breeders of pigeons, horses, and dogs, this went to men's "business and bosoms," and if the vulgar interpreted Darwinism, as some, who should know better, interpret it even now, as explaining man's descent from a monkey, or how a bear became a whale by taking to swimming, the thoughtful accepted it as a master-key unlocking not the