3i3 



THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 



[i860. 



does not thoroughly. By the way, I have been so much 

 pleased by the way he personally alludes to me. I must 

 be a very bad explainer. I hope to Heaven that you will 

 succeed better. Several reviews and several letters have 

 shown me too clearly how little I am understood. I suppose 

 " natural selection " was a bad term ; but to change it now, 

 I think, would make confusion worse confounded, nor can I 

 think of a better ; " Natural Preservation " would not imply 

 a preservation of particular varieties, and would seem a 

 truism, and would not bring man's and nature's selection 

 under one point of view. I can only hope by reiterated 

 explanations finally to make the matter clearer. If my MS. 

 spreads out, I think I shall publish one volume exclusively 

 on variation of animals and plants under domestication. 

 I want to show that I have not been quite so rash as many 

 suppose. 



Though weary of reviews, I should like to see Lowell's * 

 some time. ... I suppose Lowell's difficulty about instinct is 

 the same as Bowen's ; but it seems to me wholly to rest on 

 the assumption that instincts cannot graduate as finely as 

 structures. I have stated in my volume that it is hardly 

 possible to know which, i.e. whether instinct or structure, 

 change first by insensible steps. Probably sometimes instinct, 

 sometimes structure. When a British insect feeds on an 

 exotic plant, instinct has changed by very small steps, and 

 their structures might change so as to fully profit by the 

 new food. Or structure might change first, as the direction 

 of tusks in one variety of Indian elephants, which leads it to 

 attack the tiger in a different manner from other kinds of 

 elephants. Thanks for your letter of the 2nd, chiefly about 

 Murray. (N.B. Harvey of Dublin gives me, in a letter, the 

 argument of tall men marrying short women, as one of great 

 weight ! t) 



* The late J. A. Lowell in the 

 1 Christian Examiner ' (Boston, 



U. S.), May, i860. 



t See footnote, ante, p. 261. 



