204 DARW1NIANISM. 



have never perceived but one fault in you, and that you 

 have grievously, viz. modesty ; you form an exception to 

 Sydney Smith's aphorism, that merit and modesty have 

 no other connection, except in their first letter ! " Few 

 things," he says (p. 334) to Ly ell, "have surprised me 

 more than the entire paucity of objections and difficulties 

 new to me in the published reviews : your remarks are of 

 a different stamp and new to me : I will run through them 

 and make a few pleadings such as occur to me." But 

 that already is only a poor ingratiation compared with 

 the veritable seduction of just a year earlier on the eve 

 of the publication of the Origin " As you go as far as 

 you do, I begin strongly to think, judging from myself, 

 that you will go much further : how slowly the older 

 geologists admitted your grand views on existing geological 

 causes of change I " If the compliment to Hooker is a 

 little what even a German would call plump, surely there 

 is an insinuating fineness in that to Lyell which must 

 have proved irresistible ! 



In short, how else than with a little slyness explain 

 all that somewhat barefaced soft-sawder on the part of 

 such a man as Darwin ? Must there not have re- 

 mained in him, though altogether unbefangen, that same 

 strand of wiliuess which he himself declares to have 

 existed in the boy ? Generally, have we not now seen 

 enough in confirmation of the entire position which this 

 chapter as a whole is there to make good ? 



As necessary preliminaries, we pass now to considera- 

 tion of what are in reference here as the Struggle for 

 Existence and the Survival of the Fittest. 



