24:0 ORIGIN OF SPECIES. [ch. xiii. 



review prefixed. Whatever be the nature of your review, I 

 assure you I should feel it a great honour to have my book 

 thus preceded. . . . 



C. D. to C. Lyell. Down [February 15th, I860]. 



... I am perfectly convinced (having read it this morn- 

 ing) that the review in the Annals * is by Wollaston ; no 

 one else in the world would have used so many parentheses. 

 I have written to him, and told him that the " pestilent " 

 fellow thanks him for his kind manner of speaking about 

 him. I have also told him that he would be pleased to hear 

 that the Bishop of Oxford says it is the most unphilo- 

 sophical f work he ever read. The review seems to me 

 clever, and only misinterprets me in a few places. Like all 

 hostile men, he passes over the explanation given of Classi- 

 fication, Morphology, Embryology, and Rudimentary Or- 

 gans, &c. I read Wallace's paper in MS., J and thought it 

 admirably good ; he does not know that he has been antici- 

 pated about the depth of intervening sea determining dis- 

 tribution. . . . The most curious point in the paper seems 

 to me that about the African character of the Celebes pro- 

 ductions, but I should require further confirmation. . . . 



Henslow is staying here ; I have had some talk with 

 him ; he is in much the same state as Bunbury,* and will 

 go a very little way with us, but brings up no real argument 

 against going further. He also shudders at the eye ! It is 

 really curious (and perhaps is an argument in our favour) 

 how differently different opposers view the subject. Hens- 

 low used to rest his opposition on the imperfection of the 

 Geological Eecord, but he now thinks nothing of this, and 

 says I have got well out of it ; I wish I could quite agree 



* Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist, third series, vol. v., p. 132. My father 

 has obviously taken the expression "pestilent" from the following passage 

 (p. 138) . " But who is this Nature, we have a right to ask, who has such tre- 

 mendous power, and to whose efficiency such marvellous performances are 

 ascribed ? What are her image and attributes, when dragged from her wordy 

 lurking-place t Is she ought "but a pestilent abstraction,"like dust cast in our 

 eyes to obscure the workings of an Intelligent First Cause of all ? " The re- 

 viewer pays a tribute to my father's candour " so manly and outspoken as 

 almost to ' cover a multitude of sins.' " The parentheses (to which allusion is 

 made above) are so frequent as to give a characteristic appearance to Mr. 

 Wollaston's pages. 



t Another version of the words is given by Lyell, to whom they were 

 spoken, viz. " the most illogical book ever written." "Life and Letters of Sir C. 

 Lyell, vol. ii. p. 358. 



X " On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago." Linn. Soc. 

 Jonrn. 1860. 



# The late Sir Charles Bunbury, well known as a Palseo-botanist. 



