friend's interest in my welfare led him to give. But, as I have
confessed elsewhere, when I was a young man, there was just a little--a
mere soupcon--in my composition of that tenacity of purpose which has
another name; and I felt sure that all the evil things prophesied would
not be so painful to me as the giving up that which I had resolved to
do, upon grounds which I conceived to be right. [(As to this advice not
to publish "Man's Place" for fear of misrepresentation on the score of
morals, he said, in criticising an attack of this sort made upon Darwin
in the "Quarterly" for July 1876:--] "It seemed to me, however, that a
man of science has no raison d'etre at all, unless he is willing to face
much greater risks than these for the sake of that which he believes to
be true; and further, that to a man of science such risks do not count
for much--that they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of
letters, for example.") So the book came out; and I must do my friend
the justice to say that his forecast was completely justified. The
Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation and
ridicule for some years, and I was even as one of the wicked. Indeed, it
surprises me at times to think how anyone who had sunk so low could
since have emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability.
Personally, like the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I
did not feel "one penny the worse." Translated into several languages,
the book reached a wider public than I had ever hoped for; being largely
helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine advertisements to which I referred.
It has had the honour of being freely utilised without acknowledgment by
writers of repute; and finally it achieved the fate, which is the
euthanasia of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble of
the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten.

To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed during the last
thirty years. I doubt not that there are truths as plainly obvious and