Huxley's to degrade him." By the middle of February it reached its
second thousand; in July it is heard of as republished in America; at
the same time L. Buchner writes that he wished to translate it into
German, but finds himself forestalled by Victor Carus. From another
aspect, Lord Enniskillen, thanking him for the book, says (March 3), "I
believe you are already excommunicated by book, bell, and candle," while
in an undated note, Bollaert writes, "The Bishop of Oxford the other day
spoke about 'the church having been in danger of late, by such books as
Colenso's, but that it (the church) was now restored.' And this at a
time, he might have added, when the works of Darwin, Lyell, and Huxley
are torn from the hands of Mudie's shopmen, as if they were novels--(see
"Daily Telegraph," April 10)."

At the same time, the impression left by his work upon the minds of the
leading men of science may be judged from a few words of Sir Charles
Lyell, who writes to a friend on March 15, 1863 ("Life and Letters" 2
366):--

Huxley's second thousand is going off well. If he had leisure like you
and me, and the vigour and logic of the lectures, and his address to the
Geological Society, and half a dozen other recent works (letters to the
"Times" on Darwin, etc.), had been all in one book, what a position he
would occupy! I entreated him not to undertake the "Natural History
Review" before it began. The responsibility all falls on the man of
chief energy and talent; it is a quarterly mischief, and will end in
knocking him up.

A similar estimate appears from an earlier letter of March 11, 1859
("Life and Letters" 2 321), when he quotes Huxley's opinion of Mansel's
Bampton Lectures on the "Limits of Religious Thought":--