Samuel Butler: a sketch | Page 5

so near
the same spot--think it safer to ride over to him and put him across the
river. The river was very low and so clear that we could see every stone.
On getting to the river-bed we lit a fire and did the same on leaving it;
our tracks would guide anyone over the intervening ground.
Besides his occupation with the sheep, he found time to play the piano,
to read and to write. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are
two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully annotated by him at the
University and in the colony. He also read the Origin of Species, which,
as everyone knows, was published in 1859. He became "one of Mr.
Darwin's many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophic dialogue
(the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into
supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the
Origin of Species" (Unconscious Memory, close of Chapter I). This
dialogue, unsigned, was printed in the Press, Canterbury, New Zealand,
on 20th December, 1862. A copy of the paper was sent to Charles
Darwin, who forwarded it to a, presumably, English editor with a letter,
now in the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand, speaking of the
dialogue as "remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and
accurate an account of Mr. D's theory." It is possible that Butler himself
sent the newspaper containing his dialogue to Mr. Darwin; if so he did
not disclose his name, for Darwin says in his letter that he does not
know who the author was. Butler was closely connected with the Press,
which was founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first
Superintendent of the Province, in May, 1861; he frequently
contributed to its pages, and once, during FitzGerald's absence, had
charge of it for a short time, though he was never its actual editor. The
Press reprinted the dialogue and the correspondence which followed its
original appearance on 8th June, 1912.
On 13th June, 1863, the Press printed a letter by Butler signed

"Cellarius" and headed "Darwin among the Machines," reprinted in The
Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912). The letter begins:
"Sir: There are few things of which the present generation is more
justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily
taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances"; and goes on to say
that, as the vegetable kingdom was developed from the mineral, and as
the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, "so now, in the last
few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet
have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian types
of the race." He then speaks of the minute members which compose the
beautiful and intelligent little animal which we call the watch, and of
how it has gradually been evolved from the clumsy brass clocks of the
thirteenth century. Then comes the question: Who will be man's
successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own
successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the
dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are
becoming, animate.
In 1863 Butler's family published in his name A First Year in
Canterbury Settlement, which, as the preface states, was compiled from
his letters home, his journal and extracts from two papers contributed to
the Eagle. These two papers had appeared in the Eagle as three articles
entitled "Our Emigrant" and signed "Cellarius." The proof-sheets of the
book went out to New Zealand for correction and were sent back in the
Colombo, which was as unfortunate as the Burmah, for she was
wrecked. The proofs, however, were fished up, though so nearly
washed out as to be almost undecipherable. Butler would have been
just as well pleased if they had remained at the bottom of the Indian
Ocean, for he never liked the book and always spoke of it as being full
of youthful priggishness; but I think he was a little hard upon it. Years
afterwards, in one of his later books, after quoting two passages from
Mr. Grant Allen and pointing out why he considered the second to be a
recantation of the first, he wrote: "When Mr. Allen does make
stepping-stones of his dead selves he jumps upon them to some tune."
And he was perhaps a little inclined to treat his own dead self too much
in the same spirit.

Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864, and returned via
Callao to England. He travelled with three friends whose acquaintance
he had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli, to whom he
dedicated Life and Habit. He arrived in August, 1864, in London,
where he took chambers consisting of a sitting-room,