1879), but he did not find the line I had taken a familiar one, as
he surely must have done if it had followed easily by implication
from Mr. Spencer's works. He called it "an ingenious and
paradoxical explanation" which was evidently new to him. He
concluded by saying that "it might yet afford a clue to some of the
deepest mysteries of the organic world."

Professor Mivart, when he reviewed my books on Evolution in the
American Catholic Quarterly Review (July 1881), said, "Mr Butler is
not only perfectly logical and consistent in the startling
consequences he deduces from his principles, but," &c. Professor
Mivart could not have found my consequences startling if they had
already been insisted upon for many years by one of the best-known
writers of the day.

The reviewer of "Evolution Old and New" in the Saturday Review
(March 31, 1879), of whom all I can venture to say is that he or she
is a person whose name carries weight in matters connected with
biology, though he (for brevity) was in the humour for seeing
everything objectionable in me that could be seen, still saw no Mr.
Spencer in me. He said--"Mr Butler's own particular contribution to
the terminology of Evolution is the phrase two or three times
repeated with some emphasis" (I repeated it not two or three times
only, but whenever and wherever I could venture to do so without
wearying the reader beyond endurance) "oneness of personality
between parents and offspring." The writer proceeded to reprobate
this in language upon which a Huxley could hardly improve, but as he
declares himself unable to discover what it means, it may be
presumed that the idea of continued personality between successive
generations was new to him.