18591863] CROSSING 147 



" blindness of preconceived opinion ' the simple belief of Letter 98 

 creation. And so on in other cases. But I beg pardon for 

 troubling you. I am heartily sorry that in your unselfish 

 endeavours to spread what you believe to be truth, you 

 should have incurred so brutal an attack. 1 And now I will 

 not think any more of this false and malignant attack. 



To Maxwell Masters. Letter 99 



Down, April I3th [1860]. 



I thank you very sincerely for your two kind notes. The 

 next time you write to your father I beg you to give him 

 from me my best thanks, but I am sorry that he should have 

 had the trouble of writing when ill. I have been much 

 interested by the facts given by him. If you think he would 

 in the least care to hear the result of an artificial cross of two 

 sweet peas, you can send the enclosed ; if it will only trouble 

 him, tear it up. There seems to be so much parallelism in the 

 kind of variation from my experiment, which was certainly a 

 cross, and what Mr. Masters has observed, that I cannot help 

 suspecting that his peas were crossed by bees, which I have 

 seen well dusted with the pollen of the sweet pea ; but then 

 I wish this, and how hard it is to prevent one's wish biassing 

 one's judgment ! 



I was struck with your remark about the Compositae, etc. 

 I do not see that it bears much against me, and whether it 

 does or not is of course of not the slightest importance. 

 Although I fully agree that no definition can be drawn 

 between monstrosities and slight variations (such as my theory 

 requires), yet I suspect there is some distinction. Some 

 facts lead me to think that monstrosities supervene generally 

 at an early age ; and after attending to the subject I have 

 great doubts whether species in a state of nature ever 

 become modified by such sudden jumps as would result from 



1 The Edinburgh Reviewer, referring to Huxley's Royal Institution 

 Lecture given Feb. loth, 1860, "On Species and Races and their 

 Origin," says (p. 521), " We gazed with amazement at the audacity of the 

 dispenser of the hour's intellectual amusement, who, availing himself of 

 the technical ignorance of the majority of his auditors, sought to blind 

 them as to the frail foundations of 'natural selection ' by such illustra- 

 tions as the subjoined " : And then follows a critique of the lecturer's 

 comparison of the supposed descent of the horse from the Palaeothere 

 with that of various kinds of domestic pigeons from the Rock-pigeon, 



