Eastbourne June 29, 1895.

LECTURES AND ESSAYS BY T.H. HUXLEY

ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THE PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE

NOTICE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The Publisher of these interesting Lectures, having made an arrangement
for their publication with Mr. J. A. Mays, the Reporter, begs to append
the following note from Professor Huxley:--

"Mr. J. Aldous Mays, who is taking shorthand notes of my 'Lectures to
Working Men,' has asked me to allow him, on his own account, to print
those Notes for the use of my audience. I willingly accede to this
request, on the understanding that a notice is prefixed to the effect
that I have no leisure to revise the Lectures, or to make alterations in
them, beyond the correction of any important error in a matter of fact."

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE.

When it was my duty to consider what subject I would select for the six
lectures [*To Working Men, at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863.]
which I shall now have the pleasure of delivering to you, it occurred to
me that I could not do better than endeavour to put before you in a true
light, or in what I might perhaps with more modesty call, that which I
conceive myself to be the true light, the position of a book which has
been more praised and more abused, perhaps, than any book which has
appeared for some years;--I mean Mr. Darwin's work on the "Origin of
Species". That work, I doubt not, many of you have read; for I know the
inquiring spirit which is rife among you. At any rate, all of you will
have heard of it,--some by one kind of report and some by another kind
of report; the attention of all and the curiosity of all have been
probably more or less excited on the subject of that work. All I can
do, and all I shall attempt to do, is to put before you that kind of
judgment which has been formed by a man, who, of course, is liable
to judge erroneously; but, at any rate, of one whose business and
profession it is to form judgments upon questions of this nature.

And here, as it will always happen when dealing with an extensive
subject, the greater part of my course--if, indeed, so small a number of
lectures can be properly called a course--must be devoted to preliminary
matters, or rather to a statement of those facts and of those principles
which the work itself dwells upon, and brings more or less directly
before us. I have no right to suppose that all or any of you
are naturalists; and even