CEITICS EELEVANT AND IRBELEVANT 515 



show how powerful the book must be felt to be. You 

 and Asa Gray are models of prudent dissentients. Clark, 

 Phillips, Haughton, Sedgwick, Whately seem to me all to 

 be heside the mark, they cannot appreciate the subject, are 

 not naturalists, and have no real understanding of the funda- 

 mentals of Nat. Hist. 



Edinburgh opinion, led by Balfour, the Professor of Botany, 

 was also in opposition. The following extracts are from letters 

 to Anderson, Hooker's Calcutta friend, who was then in 

 Edinburgh. 



Only think of five Reviews taking up Darwin in one month, 

 viz.. Quarterly, British Do., Edinburgh, Frazer's, N. British. 

 Nothing but the super-excellence of the book and of its theory 

 could command such attention ; tell this to the Edinenses ! 



I hope you have read Owen's review in the Edinburgh. 



I should think it must add gall to the Balfourians' bitterness 



of spirit, for not content with snubbing me and spitefully 



. entreating Darwin and Huxley, the cool fish hedges for a 



transmutation view of his own ! 



The following letters to his old friend Harvey illustrate 

 his attitude towards a fellow botanist — perhaps a systematist 

 rather than a generaliser — ^who could appreciate the scientific 

 arguments involved, but who was strongly moved by questions 

 of religious metaphysics and the suspicion that Darwin had 

 ascribed too great efficacy to secondary causes and, as it were, 

 deified Natural Selection. He had refrained from reading the 

 * Origin ' until his lectures should be over and himself at leisure. 

 He had, however, written in the Gardeners' Chronicle, February 

 18, 1860, on a monstrous sport of Begonia frigida so different 

 from the normal type that it might have typified a distinct 

 natural order. This he adduced as an objection to the theory 

 of natural selection, which supposed changes not to take 

 place per saltum. Hooker replied in the next number of the 

 Gardeners' Chronicle, showing that a fallacy underlay this 

 example. 



Harvey had also written and privately printed a serio- 

 comic squib on Darwin for the Dublin University Zoological 



