252 EVOLUTION [CHAP. IV 



Letter 179 slowly getting up to my former standard. I shall soon be 

 confined to a living grave, and a fearful evil it is. 



I suppose you have read Tyndall. 1 I have now come 

 round again to Ramsay's 2 view, for the third or fourth time ; 

 but Lyell says when I read his discussion in the Elements} 

 I shall recant for the fifth time. What a capital writer 

 Tyndall is ! 



In your last note you ask what the Bardfield oxlip is. It 

 is P. elatior of Jacq., which certainly looks, when growing, to 

 common eyes different from the common oxlip. I will fight 

 you to the death that as primrose and cowslip are different in 

 appearance (not to mention odour, habitat and range), and as 

 I can now show that, when they cross, the intermediate 

 offspring are sterile like ordinary hybrids, they must be called 

 as good species as a man and a gorilla. 



I agree that if Scott's red cowslip grew wild or spread 

 itself and did not vary [into] common cowslip (and we have 

 absolutely no proof of primrose or cowslip varying into each 

 other), and as it will not cross with the cowslip, it would be 

 a perfectly good species. The power of remaining for a good 

 long period constant I look at as the essence of a species, 

 combined with an appreciable amount of difference ; and no 

 one can say there is not this amount of difference between 

 primrose and oxlip. 



Letter 180 Hugh Falconer 4 to W. Sharpey. 



Falconer had proposed Darwin for the Copley Medal of the Royal 

 Society (which was awarded to him in 1864), but being detained abroad, 

 he gave his reasons for supporting Darwin for this honour in a letter to 

 Sharpey, the Secretary of the Royal Society. A copy of the letter here 

 printed seems to have been given to Erasmus Darwin, and by him shown 

 to his brother Charles. 



1 Probably Tyndall " On the Conformation of the Alps " (Phil. Mag., 

 1864, p. 255). 



2 Phil. Mag., 1864, p. 293. 



3 This refers to a discussion on the " Connection of the predominance 

 of Lakes with Glacial Action" (Elements, Ed. VI., pp. 168-74). Lyell 

 adheres to the views expressed in the Antiquity of Man (1863) against 

 Ramsay's theory of the origin of lake basins by ice action. 



4 Hugh Falconer (1809-65) was a student at the Universities of 

 Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and went out to India in 1830 as Assistant- 

 Surgeon on the Bengal Establishment. In 1832 he succeeded Dr. Royle 

 as the Superintendent of the Botanic Gardens at Saharunpur ; and in 



