Anguish over the death of his son of scarlet fever in September 1860 pushed Huxley to the brink, from which Kingsley rescued him by a series of letters. Huxley put his fury over the death into composing a paper which violently assaulted Owen's ideas and professional reputation. It was published in January 1861 in the first issue of Huxley's relaunched Natural History Review magazine, and presented citations, quotations and letters from leading anatomists to attack Owen's three claims, aiming to prove him "guilty of wilful and deliberate falsehood" by citing Owen himself, and (with less clear cut justification) the anatomists whose illustrations Owen had used in the 1857 paper. While readily agreeing that the human brain differed from that of apes in size, proportions and complexity of convolutions, Huxley played the significance of these features down, and argued that to a lesser extent these also differed between the "highest" and "lowest" human races. Darwin congratulated Huxley on this "smasher" against the "canting humbug" Owen. From February to May Huxley delivered a very popular series of sixpenny lectures for working men at the School of Mines where he taught, on "The Relation of Man to the Rest of the Animal Kingdom". He told his wife that "My working men stick by me wonderfully, the house being fuller than ever last night. By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys."
