22b EVOLUTION [Cum. Ill 



Letter 154 tried with the faintest hope of success — namely, to get, if 

 possible, a case of two birds which when paired were unpro- 

 ductive, yet neither impotent. For instance, I had this 

 morning a letter with a case of a Hereford heifer, which 

 seemed to be, after repeated trials, sterile with one particular 

 and tar from impotent bull, but not with another bull. But 

 it is too long a story — it is to attempt to make two strains, 

 both fertile, and yet sterile when one of one strain is crossed 

 with one of the other strain. But the difficulty . . . would 

 be beyond calculation. As far as I see, Tegetmeier's plan 

 would simply test whether two existing breeds arc now in 

 any slight degree sterile ; which has already been largely 

 tested : not that I dispute the good of re-testing. 



Letter 155 To Hu g h Falconer. 



The original letter is dated " Dec. 10th," but this must, we think, 

 be a slip of the pen for Jan. 10th. It contains a reference to No. VI. 

 of the Lectures to Working Men which, as Mr. Leonard Huxley is good 

 enough to inform us, was not delivered until Dec. 15th, and there- 

 fore could not have been seen by Mr. Darwin on Dec. 10th. The 

 change of date makes comprehensible the reference to Falconer's paper 

 " On the American Fossil Elephant of the Regions bordering the Gulf 

 of Mexico {E. Columbi, Falc.)," which appeared in the January number of 

 the Natural History Review. It is true that he had seen advanced 

 sheets of Falconer's paper {Life and Letters, II., p. 389), but the reference 

 lie re is to the complete paper. 



In the present volume we have thought it right to give some 

 expression to the attitude of Darwin towards Owen. Professor Owen's 

 biographer has clearly felt the difficulty of making a statement on Owen's 

 attitude towards Darwinism, and has {Life of Sir Richard Owen, Vol. II., 

 p. 92) been driven to adopt the severe indictment contained in the Origin 

 of Species, Ed. vi., p. xviii. Darwin was by no means alone in his 

 distrust of Owen ; and to omit altogether a reference to the conduct which 

 led up to the isolation of Owen among his former friends and colleagues 

 would be to omit a part of the history of science of the day. And since 

 we cannot omit to notice Darwin's point of view, it seems right to give 

 the facts of a typical case illustrating the feeling with which he regarded 

 Owen. This is all the more necessary since the recently published 

 biography of Sir R. Owen gives no hint, as far as we are aware, of even 

 a difference of opinion with other scientific men. 



The account which Falconer gives in the above-mentioned paper in 

 the Nat. Hist. Review (Jan., 1863) would be amusing if the matter 

 were less serious. In 1857 Falconer described {Quart, fourn. Geol. Soc, 

 XIII.) a new species of fossil elephant from America, to which he gave the 



