174 EVOLUTION [CHAP. Ill 



Letter 115 have never met an ornithologist who believed in his [illegible]. 

 Are these subspecies really characteristic of certain different 

 regions of Germany ? 



Should you write, I should much like to know how the 

 German edition sells. 



Letter 116 To J. S. Henslow. 



Oct. 26th [1860]. 



Many thanks for your note and for all the trouble about 

 the seeds, which will be most useful to me next spring. On 

 my return home I will send the shillings. 1 I concluded that 

 Dr. Bree had blundered about the Celts. I care not for his 

 dull, unvarying abuse of me, and singular misrepresentation. 

 But at p. 244 he in fact doubts my deliberate word, and 

 that is the act of a man who has not the soul of a gentleman 

 in him. Kingslcy is " the celebrated author and divine ' 

 whose striking sentence I give in the second edition with 

 his permission. I did not choose to ask him to let me use 

 his name, and as he did not volunteer, I had of course 

 no choice. 3 



1 Shillings for the little girls in Henslow's parish who collected seeds 

 for Darwin. 



2 Species not Transmutable, by C. R. Bree. After quoting from the 

 Origin, Ed. II., p. 481, the words in which a celebrated author and divine 

 confesses that "he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a 

 conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms, 

 etc.," Dr. Bree goes on : "I think we ought to have had the name of 

 this divine given with this remarkable statement. I confess that I have 

 not yet fully made up my mind that any divine could have ever penned 

 lines so fatal to the truths he is called upon to teach." 



3 We are indebted to Mr. G. W. Prothero for calling our attention to 

 the following striking passage from the works of a divine of this period : 

 " Just a similar scepticism has been evinced by nearly all the first 

 physiologists of the day, who have joined in rejecting the development 

 theories of Lamarck and the Vestiges. . . . Yet it is now acknowledged 

 under the high sanction of the name of Owen that ' creation' is only another 

 name for our ignorance of the mode of production . . . while a work has 

 now appeared by a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, 

 Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on the Origin of Species, by the law 

 of ' natural selection,' which now substantiates on undeniable grounds 

 the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists the origina- 

 tion of new species by natural causes : a work which must soon bring 

 about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of 



