three weeks ago, and was told the author was a friend of mine. But I
remained hopelessly in the dark till yesterday. What do you say to Sir
Philip Egerton coming out in that line? I am told he is the author, and
the fact speaks volumes for Owen's perfect success in damning himself.

[In the midst of the fight came a surprising invitation. On April 10 he
writes to his wife:--]

They have written to me from the Philosophical Institute of Edinburgh to
ask me to give two lectures on the "Relation of Man to the Lower
Animals" next session. I have replied that if they can give me January 3
and 7 for lecture days I will do it--if not, not. Fancy unco guid
Edinburgh requiring illumination on the subject! They know my views, so
if they did not like what I have to tell them, it is their own fault.

[These lectures were eventually delivered on January 4 and 7, 1862, and
were well reported in the Edinburgh papers. The substance of them
appears as Part 2 in "Man's Place in Nature," the first lecture
describing the general nature of the process of development among
vertebrate animals, and the modifications of the skeleton in the
mammalia; the second dealing with the crucial points of comparison
between the higher apes and man, namely the hand, foot, and brain. He
showed that the differences between man and the higher apes were no
greater than those between the higher and lower apes. If the Darwinian
hypothesis explained the common ancestry of the latter, the anatomist
would have no difficulty with the origin of man, so far as regards the
gap between him and the higher apes.

Yet, though convinced that] "that hypothesis is as near an approximation
to the truth as, for example, the Copernican hypothesis was to the true