i860.] LYELL'S criticisms. I3I 



written. Your many metaphors are inimitably good. I said 

 in a former letter that you were a lawyer, but I made a gross 

 mistake, I am sure that you are a poet. No, by Jove, I will 

 tell you what you are, a hybrid, a complex cross of lawyer, 

 poet, naturalist and theologian I Was there ever such a mon- 

 ster seen before .'* 



I have just looked through the passages which I have 

 marked as appearing to me extra good, but I see that they 

 are too numerous to specify, and this is no exaggeration. 

 My eye just alights on the happy comparison of the colours 

 of the prism and our artificial groups. I see one little error 

 of fossil caU/e in South America. 



It is curious how each one, I suppose, weighs arguments 

 in a different balance : embryology is to me by far the strong- 

 est single class of facts in favour of change of forms, and not 

 one, J think, of my reviewers has alluded to this. Variation 

 not coming on at a very early age, and being inherited at not 

 a very early corresponding period, explains, as it seems to 

 me, the grandest of all facts in natural history, or rather in j 

 zoology, viz. the resemblance of embryos. 



[Dr. Gray wrote three articles in the * Atlantic Monthly ' for 

 July, August, and Oc'^ober, which were reprinted as a pam- 

 phlet in 1861, and now form chapter iii. in 'Darwiniana' 

 (1876), with the heading * Natural Selection not inconsistent 

 with Natural Theology.'] 



C. Darwin to C. Lyell. 



Down, September 12th [i860]. 



My dear Lyell, — I never thought of showing your letter 

 to any one. I mentioned in a letter to Hooker that I had 

 been much interested by a letter of yours with original objec- 

 tions, founded chiefly on Natural Selection not having done 



so much as might have been expected In your letter 



just received, you have improved your case versus Natural 

 Selection ; and it would tell with the public (do not be 



