As we have seen, the Origin hinted at man's inclusion in Darwin's evolutionary theory, and both critics and supporters were not slow to seize on the hint. But Darwin waited until 1871 to make public his views on the matter. He had in a sense been anticipated by the publications of his friends Huxley and Lyell. Huxley's Man's Place in Nature and Lyell's Antiquity of Man both came out in 1863. Huxley, continuing and developing his argument with Wilberforce and Owen, had shown the near physical resemblance between man and the apes: ‘the proposition holds good, that the differences between Man and the Gorilla are of smaller value than those between the Gorilla and some other Apes’ (Collected Essays (1893-4), vol. 7, p. III). Lyell had established that fossil remains of men were deposited at the same time as those of some extinct animals, thus disposing of the theory that man had only been created after the last ‘catastrophe’. He had also given rather half-hearted and tentative support to Darwin's hypothesis. It was now up to Darwin to apply his theory of natural selection to the evolution of man. But this is just where the difficulty lay: to start with, Darwin himself had come increasingly to doubt the unaided power of natural selection, and a large part of the Descent is devoted to discussing a quite different mechanism, sexual selection.