ch. xii.] OCTOBER 1859, TO DECEMBER, 1859. 219 



sation immense, too great perhaps for the uninitiated, but 

 an effective and important preliminary statement, which 

 will admit, even before your detailed proofs appear, of some 

 occasional useful exemplification, such as your pigeons and 

 cirri pedes, of which you make such excellent use. 



I mean that, when, as I fully expect, a new edition is 

 soon called for, you may here and there insert an actual 

 case to relieve the vast number of abstract propositions. So 

 far as I am concerned, I am so well prepared to take your 

 statements of facts for granted, that I do not think the 

 " pieces justificatives " when published will make much dif- 

 ference, and I have long seen most clearly that if any con- 

 cession is made, all that you claim in your concluding pages 

 will follow. It is this which has made me so long hesitate, 

 always feeling that the case of Man and his races, and of 

 other animals, and that of plants is one and the same, and 

 that if a "vera causa" be admitted for one, instead of a 

 purely unknown and imaginary one, such as the word 

 " Creation," all the consequences must follow. 



I fear I have not time to-day, as I am just leaving this 

 place to indulge in a variety of comments, and to say how 

 much I was delighted with Oceanic Islands Rudimentary 

 Organs Embryology the genealogical key to the Xatural 

 System, Geographical Distribution, and if I went on I 

 should be copying the heads of all your chapters. But I 

 will say a word of the Recapitulation, in case some slight 

 alteration, or, at least, omission of a word or two be still 

 possible in that. 



In the first place, at p. 480, it cannot surely be said that 

 the most eminent naturalists have rejected the view of the 

 mutability of species ? You do not mean to ignore Gr. St. 

 Hilaire and Lamarck. As to the latter, you may say, that 

 in regard to animals you substitute natural selection for 

 volition to a certain considerable extent, but in his theory 

 of the changes of plants he could not introduce volition ; 

 he may, no doubt, have laid an undue comparative stress on 

 changes in physical conditions, and too little on those of 

 contending organisms. He at least was for the universal 

 mutability of species and for a genealogical link between 

 the first and the present. The men of his school also ap- 

 pealed to domesticated varieties. (Do you mean living nat- 

 uralists ?) * 



* In his next letter to Lyell my father writes ; " The omission of ' living 



