48 EVOLUTION [CHAP. II 



Letter 16 With respect to the word " sterile " as used for male or 

 polleniferous flowers, it has always offended my ears dread- 

 fully ; on the same principle that it would to hear a potent 

 stallion, ram or bull called sterile, because they did not bear, 

 as well as beget, young. 



With respect to your geological-map suggestion, I wish 

 with all my heart I could follow it ; but just reflect on the 

 number of measurements requisite : why, at present it could 

 not be done even in England, even with the assumption of 

 the land having simply risen any exact number of feet. But 

 subsidence in most cases has hopelessly complexed the 

 problem : see what Jordanhill-Smith l says of the dance up 

 and down, many times, which Gibraltar has had all within 

 the recent period. Such maps as Lyell 2 has published of 

 sea and land at the beginning of the Tertiary period must be 

 excessively inaccurate : it assumes that every part on which 

 Tertiary beds have not been deposited, must have then been 

 dry land, a most doubtful assumption. 



I have been amused by Chambers v. Hooker on the K. 

 Cabbage. I see in the Explanations 3 (the spirit of which, 



1 James Smith, of Jordan Hill, author of a paper "On the Geology of 

 Gibraltar" (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., Vol. II., p. 41, 1846). 



2 Principles of Geology, 1875, Vol. I., Plate i, p. 254. 



3 Explanations : A Sequel to the Vestiges of the Natural History of 

 Creation was published in 1845, after the appearance of the fourth 

 edition of the Vestiges, by way of reply to the criticisms on the original 

 book. The " K. cabbage " referred to at the beginning of the paragraph 

 is Pri?iglea antiscorbutica, the " Kerguelen Cabbage " described by Sir 

 J. D. Hooker in his Flora Antarctica. What Chambers wrote on this 

 subject we have not discovered. The mention of Sedgwick is a refer- 

 ence to his severe review of the Vestiges in the Edinburgh Review, 1845, 

 vol. 82, p. i. Darwin described it as savouring "of the dogmatism of 

 the pulpit" (Life and Letters, I., p. 344). Mr. Ireland's edition of the 

 Vestiges (1884), in which Robert Chambers was first authentically an- 

 nounced as the author, contains (p. xxix) an extract from a letter written 

 by Chambers in 1860, in which the following passage occurs, "The April 

 number of the Edinburgh Review (1860) makes all but a direct amende 

 for the abuse it poured upon my work a number of years ago." This is 

 the well-known review by Owen, to which references occur in the Life 

 and Letters, II., p. 300. The amende to the Vestiges is not so full as the 

 author felt it to be ; but it was clearly in place in a paper intended to 

 belittle the Origin ; it also gave the reviewer (p. 511) an opportunity for 

 a hit at Sedgwick and his 1845 review. 



