and of Life and Halit 41

They rather show the preparation of the soil in which those
germs sprouted and grew ; and, remembering his last remark on
the subject that " it was all very young and silly," I decided to
omit them. The Dialogue is no longer lost, and the numbers of
- the Press containing it and the correspondence that ensued can
be seen in the British Museum.

Butler's other two contributions to the Press mentioned above
do contain the germs of the machine chapters in Erewhon, and
led him to the theory put forward in Life and Habit. In 1901
he wrote in the preface to the new and revised edition of Erewhon :
" The first part of Erewhon written was an article headed
Darwin among the Machines and signed ' Cellarius.' It was
written in the Upper Rangitata district of Canterbury Province
(as it then was] of New Zealand, and appeared at Christ-
church in the Press newspaper, June 13, 1863. A copy of
this article is indexed under my books in the British Museum
catalogue."

The article is in the form of a letter, and the copy^ spoken of by
Butler, as indexed under his name in the British Museum,
being defective, the reprint which appeared in the jubilee number
of the Press has been used in completing the version which
follows.

Further on in the preface to the 1901 edition of Erewhon he
writes: " A second article on the same subject as the one just
referred to appeared in the Press shortly after the first, but I
have no copy. It treated machines from a different point of
view and was the basis of pp. 270-274 of the present edition of
Erewhon. This view ultimately led me to the theory I put
forward in Life and Habit, published in November, 1877.* /
have put a bare outline of this theory (which I believe to be quite
sound] into the mouth of an Erewhonian professor in Chapter
XXVII of this book."

This second article was Lucubratio Ebria, and was sent by
Butler from England to the editor of the Press in 1865, with a
letter from which this is an extract:

" I send you an article which yo^£ can give to FitzGerald
or not, just as you think it most expedient—for him. Is not
the subject worked out, and are not the Canterbury people tired
of Darwinism ? For me—is it an article to my credit ? I do

* Life and Habit is dated 1878, but it actually appeared on Butler's
birth-day, 4th December, 1877,