Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2014
In March of 1861, Thomas Henry Huxley was regularly drawing crowds of six hundred working-class men to Piccadilly for his Thursday night anatomy lectures. In a letter to his wife, Huxley reported that his evolutionary message was a success: “By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys” (L. Huxley, ed. 1: 205). Two years later, the notes from these lectures would make up the core of his popular work of comparative anatomy, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.