i86o.] CLERICAL OPINIONS. 83 



couple of days ago by a clergyman, you would laugh, and ad- 

 mit that I had some excuse for bitterness. After abusing me 

 for two or three pages, in language sufficiently plain and em- 

 phatic to have satisfied any reasonable man, he sums up by 

 saying that he has vainly searched the English language to 

 find terms to express his contempt for me and all Darwini- 

 ans.' In another letter, after I had left Down, he writes, ^ 

 ' We often differed, but you are one of those rare mortals 

 from whom one can differ and yet feel no shade of animosity, 

 and that is a thing [of] which I should feel very proud, if any 

 one could say [it] of me.' 



" On my last visit to Down, Mr. Darwin said, at his din- 

 ner-table, ' Brodie Innes and I have been fast friends for 

 thirty years, and we never thoroughly agreed on any subject 

 but once, and then we stared hard at each other, and thought 

 one of us must be very ill.' "] 



C. Darwin to C. Lyell. 



Down, February 23rd [i860]. 



My dear Lyell, — That is a splendid answer of the 

 father of Judge Crompton. How curious that the Judge 

 should have hit on exr;ctly the same points as yourself. It 

 shows me what a capital lawyer you would have made, how 

 many unjust acts you would have made appear just ! But 

 how much grander a field has science been than the law, 

 though the latter might have made you Lord Kinnordy. I 

 will, if there be another edition, enlarge on gradation in the 

 eye, and on all forms coming from one prototype, so as to 

 try and make both less glaringly improbable. . . . 



With respect to Bronn's objection that it cannot be shown 

 how life arises, and likewise to a certain extent Asa Gray's 

 remark that natural selection is not a vera caiisa^ I was much 

 interested by finding accidentally in Brewster's * Life of 

 Newton,' that Leibnitz objected to the law of gravity because 

 Newton could not show what gravity itself is. As it has 

 chanced, I have used in letters this very same argument, 



