lest honor to his letter; and as long as I was in London, and
indeed for many years after, our relations were of the most cordial,
and not long before his death he made me a visit at Rome. Very much of
the enjoyment of that winter in London was due to the hospitable and
companionable welcome of the author of "Tom Brown," and one of
the most enjoyable items was the introduction to the evenings at
Macmillan's, where the contributors to the magazine used to meet
on Thursday evenings, if I remember rightly, and where I saw the
Kingsleys,--Charles only once, but Henry often enough to contract with
him a pleasant friendship. Hughes was one of the largest and most
genial English natures I knew,--robust, all alive to all his human
obligations; and in those troublesome days when the American question
was coming to the crisis of our Civil War he was a consistent friend
of the North, when the dominant feeling in English society was hostile
to it, and this was a strong bond between us.

Owen I saw frequently, and, though my scientific education was, and
is, superficial, he interested me greatly; for he had, like Agassiz,
the gift of making his knowledge accessible to those who only
understood the philosophy and not the facts of science, and I knew
enough of the former to profit by his knowledge. Then he was a warm
friend of Agassiz, and we used to talk of his theories and studies, of
which I knew more than of any other scientific subject. Like Agassiz,
he had at first resisted the theory of natural selection, but had,
unlike Agassiz, come to recognize the necessity of admitting the idea
of evolution in some form, like Asa Gray and Jeffries Wyman. How far
he finally went in recognizing the agency of natural selection as the
sufficient element in this I do not know, for at that time the battle
waged over that phase of the question; but that he did not accept the
solution proposed by Darwin as final I have reason to believe, from
the fact that, the last time I saw him, he assured me that he was
confident that if he could have seen Agassiz again before he died
he could have persuaded him that evolution was the solution of the
problem of creation, though knowing that Agassiz could never have
accepted the doctrine of natural selection in its bareness, absolutely
convinced as he was of the agency of Conscious Mind in creation. And
I had the further declaration of Owen himself in his expressed
conviction that the process of evolution was d