76 'VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION.' [l868. 



C. Darwin to J. D. Hooker. 



Down, February 10 [1868]. 



My DEAR HOOKER, — What is the good of having a friend, 

 if one may not boast to him ? I heard yesterday that Murray 

 has sold in a week the whole edition of 1 500 copies of my 

 book, and the sale so pressing that he has agreed with Clowes 

 to get another edition in fourteen days ! This has done me a 

 world of good, for I had got into a sort of dogged hatred of 

 my book. And now there has appeared a review in the Pall 

 Mall which has pleased me excessively, more perhaps than is 

 reasonable. I am quite content, and do not care how much I 

 may be pitched into. If by any chance you should hear who 

 wrote the article in the Pall Mall, do please tell me ; it is 

 some one who writes capitally, and who knows the subject. 

 I went to luncheon on Sunday, to Lubbock's, partly in hopes 

 of seeing you, and, be hanged to you, you were not there. 



Your cock-a-hoop friend, 



C. D. 



[Independently of the favourable tone of the able series of 

 notices in the Pall Mall Gazette (Feb. 10, 15, 17, 1868), my 

 father may well have been gratified by the following passages: — 



" We must call attention to the rare and noble calmness with 

 which he expounds his own views, undisturbed by the heats 

 of polemical agitation which those views have excited, and 

 persistently refusing to retort on his antagonists by ridicule, 

 by indignation, or by contempt. Considering the amount of 

 vituperation and insinuation which has come from the other 

 side, this forbearance is supremely dignified." 



And again in the third notice, Feb. 17 : — 



" Nowhere has the author a word that could wound the most 

 sensitive self-love of an antagonist ; nowhere does he, in text 

 or note, expose the fallacies and mistakes of brother investi- 

 gators . . . but while abstaining from impertinent censure, 



