624 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



every clever man in England, if he chooses, may make as many ill- 

 natured remarks as he likes on this unfortunate sentence.' " Eight 

 years later, " Writing plain English grows with me more and more 

 difficult, and never attainable." While writing the " Origin of Spe- 

 cies," although, he says, " No nigger with lash over him could have 

 worked harder at clearness than I have done," he found the style in- 

 credibly bad, and most difficult to make clear and smooth. When in- 

 formed by Lubbock of a blunder he had made in the principle of some 

 calculation, which it would require two or three weeks of work to cor- 

 rect, he exclaimed, "I am the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid dog 

 in all England, and am ready to cry with vexation at my blindness 

 and presumption"; and, "If I am as muzzy on all subjects as I am on 

 proportion and chance, what a book I shall produce ! " 



The question of priority, which arose between Mr. Darwin and Mr. 

 Wallace — both having an announcement of the theory of natural selec- 

 tion ready to publish at the same time — was settled in a manner credit- 

 able to both gentlemen, and which adds luster to the scientific spirit. 

 The letters show how far from rivalry were the feelings of both. An- 

 other question of priority arose after the " Origin " was published, 

 when Mr. Patrick Matthew brought forth an extract from a work on 

 "Naval Timber and Architecture," published in 1831, in which, says 

 Mr. Darwin, "he briefly but completely anticipates the theory of 

 natural selection. I have ordered the book, as some few passages are 

 rather obscure, but it is certainly, I think, a complete but not devel- 

 oped anticipation ! . . . Anyhow, one may be excused in not having 

 discovered the fact in a work on naval timber." Mr. Darwin published 

 an apology to Mr. Matthew for his entire ignorance of this publica- 

 tion ; but the latter could not get over the feeling that another man 

 had won the fame that he had missed. It afterward appeared that a Dr. 

 Schaaffhausen had nearly anticij^ated his view in a pamphlet published 

 at Bonn in 1853 ; and still later that Dr. Wells had applied " most dis- 

 tinctly " the principle of natural selection to the races of men in his 

 " Essay on Dew," which was read to the Royal Society in 1813. A 

 letter to Herbert Spencer, written in 1858, acknowledging the recep- 

 tions of a volume of essays from him, is of interest as showing the re- 

 lations of the work of these two laborers in adjoining fields. "Your 

 remarks," says Mr. Darwin, " on the general argument of the so-called 

 development theory seem to me admirable. I am at present prepar- 

 ing an abstract of a larger work on the changes of species ; but I treat 

 the subject simply as a naturalist, and not from a general point of 

 view, otherwise, in my opinion, your argument could not have been 

 improved on, and might have been quoted by me with great advan- 

 tage." Of one of the numbers of Spencer's "Principles of Biology " 

 Mr. Darwin observed : " I feel rather mean when I read him ; I could 

 bear, and rather enjoy feeling that he was twice as ingenious and clever 

 as myself, but when I feel that he is about a dozen times my superior, 



