108 REMINISCENCES. [en. iv. 



fully interesting letter is given in Chapter X. bequeathing 

 to my mother, in case of his death, the care of publishing 

 the manuscript of his first essay on evolution. This letter 

 seems to me full of an intense desire that his theory should 

 succeed as a contribution to knowledge, and apart from any 

 desire for personal fame. He certainly had the healthy de- 

 sire for success which a man of strong feelings ought to 

 have. But at the time of the publication of the Origin it 

 is evident that he was overwhelmingly satisfied with the ad- 

 herence of such men as Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, and Asa 

 Gray, and did not dream of or desire any such general fame 

 as that to which he attained. 



Connected with his contempt for the undue love of fame, 

 was an equally strong dislike of all questions of priority. 

 The letters to Lyell, at the time of the Origin, show the 

 anger he felt with himself for not being able to repress a 

 feeling of disappointment at what he thought was Mr. 

 Wallace's forestalling of all his years of work. His sense 

 of literary honour comes out strongly in these letters ; and 

 his feeling about priority is again shown in the admiration 

 expressed in his Recollections of Mr. Wallace's self-annihila- 

 tion. 



His feeling about reclamations, including answers to at- 

 tacks and all kinds of discussions, was strong. It is simply 

 expressed in a letter to Falconer (1863) : " If I ever felt 

 angry towards you, for whom I have a sincere friendship, I 

 should begin to suspect that I was a little mad. I w T as very 

 sorry about your reclamation, as I think it is in every case a 

 mistake and should be left to others. Whether I should so 

 act myself under provocation is a different question." It 

 was a feeling partly dictated by instinctive delicacy, and 

 partly by a strong sense of the waste of time, energy, and 

 temper thus caused. He said that he owed his determina- 

 tion not to get into discussions * to the advice of Lyell, ad- 

 vice which he transmitted to those among his friends who 

 were given to paper warfare. 



If the character of my father's working life is to be 

 understood, the conditions of ill-health, under w r hich he 



* He departed from his rule in his "Note on the Habits of the Pampas 

 Woodpecker, Colaptes campestris," Proc. Zool. Sac, 1870, p. 705 : also in a let- 

 ter published in the Athenwum (1863, p. 554), in which case he afterwards 

 regretted that he had not remained silent. His replies to criticisms, in the 

 latter editions of the Origin, can hardly be classed as infractions of his rule. 



