en formed
hastily or enunciated crudely."

"I thought," he wrote in the preface to the 1894 edition, "I had
earned the right to publish them, and even fancied I might be
thanked, rather than reproved, for so doing. However, in my
anxiety to promulgate nothing erroneous, I asked a highly
competent anatomist and very good friend of mine to look through
my proofs, and, if he could, point out any errors of fact. I was
well pleased when he returned them without any criticism on that
score; but my satisfaction was speedily dashed by the very
earnest warning, as to the consequences of publication, which my
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
of that which I had resolved to do, upon grounds which I
conceived to be right. 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 have emerged into, at any
rate, relative respectability."

Further, in the same preface, Huxley strongly advises others to
imitate his action in this matter. There are now, and no doubt there
always will be, truths "plainly obvious and generally denied." Whoever
attacks the current ideas is certain, unless human nature changes
greatly, to encounter a bitter opposition, and there will always be
those among his friends who recommend him to temper truth by prudence.
Huxley's advice is different:

"If there is a young man of the present generation who has taken
as much trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths,
let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the
barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. _Veritas praevalebit_--some
day; and, even if she does not prevail in his time, he himself
will be all the better and wiser for having tried to help her.
And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for
all his labour and pains."