174 EVOLUTION [Chap. Ill 



Letter 115 have never met an ornithologist who believed in his [illegible]. 

 Are these subspecies really characteristic of certain different 

 regions of Germany? 



Should you write, I should much like to know how the 

 German edition sells. 



Letter 1.6 To J. S. Neiislow. 



Oct. 26th [i860]. 



Many thanks for your note and for all the trouble about 



the seeds, which will be most useful to me next spring. On 



my return home I will send the shillings. 1 I concluded that 



Dr. Bree had blundered about the Celts. I care not for his 



dull, unvarying abuse of me, and singular misrepresentation. 



But at p. 244 he in fact doubts my deliberate word, and 



that is the act of a man who has not the soul of a gentleman 



in him. Kingsley is "the celebrated author and divine" 2 



whose striking sentence I give in the second edition with 



his permission. I did not choose to ask him to let me use 



his name, and as he did not volunteer, I had of course 



no choice. 3 



1 Shillings for the little girls in Henslow's parish who collected seeds 

 for Darwin. 



1 Species not Transmutable, by C. R. Bree. After quoting from the 

 Origin, Ed. II., p. 481, the words in which a celebrated author and divine 

 confesses that " he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a 

 conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms, 

 etc.," Dr. Bree goes on : "I think we ought to have had the name of 

 this divine given with this remarkable statement. I confess that I have 

 not yet fully made up my mind that any divine could have ever penned 

 lines so fatal to the truths he is called upon to teach." 



3 We are indebted to Mr. G. W. Prothero for calling our attention to 

 the following striking passage from the works of a divine of this period : — 

 "Just a similar scepticism has been evinced by nearly all the first 

 physiologists of the day, who have joined in rejecting the development 

 theories of Lamarck and the Vestiges. . . . Yet it is now acknowledged 

 under the high sanction of the name of Owen that ' creation' is only another 

 name for our ignorance of the mode of production . . . while a work has 

 now appeared by a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, 

 Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on the Origin of Species, by the law 

 of 'natural selection,' which now substantiates on undeniable grounds 

 the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists— the origina- 

 tion of new species by natural causes : a work which must soon bring 

 about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of 



