It is observable that the leading men of science seem rarely to understand this even now. I am told that Professor Huxley, in his recent lecture on the coming of age of the “Origin of Species,” never so much as alluded to the existence of any such division of opinion as this. He did not even, I am assured, mention “natural selection,” but appeared to believe, with Professor Tyndall, {10a} that “evolution” is “Mr. Darwin’s theory.” In his article on evolution in the latest edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” I find only a veiled perception of the point wherein Mr. Darwin is at variance with his precursors. Professor Huxley evidently knows little of these writers beyond their names; if he had known more, it is impossible he should have written that “Buffon contributed nothing to the general doctrine of evolution,” {10b} and that Erasmus Darwin, “though a zealous evolutionist, can hardly be said to have made any real advance on his predecessors.” {11} The article is in a high degree unsatisfactory, and betrays at once an amount of ignorance and of perception which leaves an uncomfortable impression. If this is the state of things that prevails even now, it is not surprising that in 1860 the general public should, with few exceptions, have known of only one evolution, namely, that propounded by Mr. Darwin. As a member of the general public, at that time residing eighteen miles from the nearest human habitation, and three days’ journey on horseback from a bookseller’s shop, I became one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophical dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the “Origin of Species.” This production appeared in the _Press_, Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1861 or 1862, but I have long lost the only copy I had. Chapter II How I came to write “Life and Habit,” and the circumstances of its completion.