Even before the publication of _The Origin of Species_ there was a considerable nervousness in the minds of the more orthodox as to discussions on the position of the human species in zoölogical classification. Men of the broadest minds, such as Lyell, who himself had suffered considerably from outside interference with the scientific right to publish scientific conclusions, was strongly opposed to anything that seemed to tend towards breaking down the barrier between man and the lower creatures. Sir William Lawrence, a very distinguished and able man, had been criticised with the greatest severity, and had been nearly ostracised, for a very mild little book _On Man_; and Huxley tells us that the electors to the Chair of a Scotch University had refused to invite a distinguished man, to whom the post would have been acceptable, because he had advocated the view that there were several species of man. The court political leaders, and society generally, resented strongly anything that seemed at all likely to disturb the somewhat narrow orthodoxy prevalent in those times; and, as there were comparatively few posts open to scientific men, and comparatively greater chances of posts being made for men of talent and ability who adhered to the respectable traditions, those who tampered with so serious a question as the place of man were likely to burn their fingers severely. However, the difficulties of discussing these problems were much greater immediately after 1859. One of the most surprising things in the history of this century is the sudden intensity of the opposition of the public, particularly the respectable and religious public, to zoölogical writing upon man, immediately after the publication of the _Origin_. Before that time anatomists did not necessarily hesitate to point out the close resemblance between the anatomy of man and that of the higher apes, and the difficulties anatomists had in making anatomical distinction of value between them. Thus Professor Owen, who, as a writer, was rather unusually nervous about expressing facts to which any objection might be raised by those outside the strictly scientific world, had written the following paragraph in the course of an essay on the characters of the class Mammalia, published, in 1857, in the _Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnæan Society_: "Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec, with arrested brain-growth, as being of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of structure--every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous--which makes the determination of the difference between _Homo_ and _Pithecus_ the anatomist's difficulty."