reviewed in Nature by George Romanes and Alfred Russel Wallace. Romanes stated that Butler's views on evolution had no basis from science.G. J. Romanes (1881), Unconscious Memory. Nature 23, pp. 285–287. Gregory Bateson often mentioned Butler, and saw value in some of his ideas, calling him "the ablest contemporary critic of Darwinian evolution". He noted Butler's insight into the efficiencies of habit formation (patterns of behavior and mental processes) in adapting to an environment: ...mind and pattern as the explanatory principles, which, above all, required investigation, were pushed out of biological thinking in the later evolutionary theories, which were developed in the mid-nineteenth century by Darwin, Huxley, etc. There were still some naughty boys, like Samuel Butler, who said that mind could not be ignored in this way – but they were weak voices, and, incidentally, they never looked at organisms. I don't think Butler ever looked at anything except his own cat, but he still knew more about evolution than some of the more conventional thinkers. Music In Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh, protagonist Ernest Pontifex says that he had been trying all his life to like modern music but succeeded less and less as he grew older. On being asked when he considers modern music to have begun, he says, "with Sebastian Bach". Butler liked only Handel, and in a letter to Miss Savage said, "I only want Handel's Oratorios. I would have said and things of that sort, but there are no 'things of that sort' except Handel's." With Henry Festing Jones, Butler composed choral works that Eric Blom characterized as "imitation Handel", although with satirical texts. Two of the works they collaborated on were the cantatas Narcissus (private rehearsal 1886, published 1888), and Ulysses (published posthumously in 1904), both for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. George Bernard Shaw wrote in a private letter that the music was invested with "a ridiculously complete command of the Handelian manner and technique." Around 1871 Butler was engaged as music critic by The Drawing Room Gazette. From 1890 he took counterpoint lessons with W. S. Rockstro. Biography and criticism Butler's friend Henry Festing Jones wrote the authoritative biography: the two-volume Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902): A Memoir (commonly known as Jones's Memoir), published in 1919, and reissued by HardPress Publishing in 2013. Project Gutenberg hosts a shorter "Sketch" by Jones. More recently, Peter Raby has written