lectures [*To Working Men, at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863.]
which I shall now have the pleasure of delivering to you, it occurred
to me that I could not do better than endeavour to put before you in a
true light, or in what I might perhaps with more modesty call, that
which I conceive myself to be the true light, the position of a book
which has been more praised and more abused, perhaps, than any book
which has appeared for some years;--I mean Mr. Darwin's work on the
"Origin of Species". That work, I doubt not, many of you have read;
for I know the inquiring spirit which is rife among you. At any rate,
all of you will have heard of it,--some by one kind of report and some
by another kind of report; the attention of all and the curiosity of
all have been probably more or less excited on the subject of that
work. All I can do, and all I shall attempt to do, is to put before
you that kind of judgment which has been formed by a man, who, of
course, is liable to judge erroneously; but, at any rate, of one whose
business and profession it is to form judgments upon questions of this
nature.

And here, as it will always happen when dealing with an extensive
subject, the greater part of my course--if, indeed, so small a number
of lectures can be properly called a course--must be devoted to
preliminary matters, or rather to a statement of those facts and of
those principles which the work itself dwells upon, and brings more or
less directly before us. I have no right to suppose that all or any of
you are naturalists; and even if you were, the misconceptions and
misunderstandings prevalent even among naturalists on these matters
would make it desirable that I should take the course I now propose to
take,--that I should start from the beginning,--that I should endeavour
to point out what is the existing state of the organic world,--that I
should point out its past condition,--that I should state what is the