302 LIFE AT DOWN. ^TAT. 33-45. [1844-5 



the writing and arrangement are certainly admirable, but his 

 geology strikes me as bad, and his zoology far worse. I 

 should be very much obliged, if at any future or leisure time 

 you could tell me on what you ground your doubtful belief 

 in imagination of a mother affecting her offspring.* I have 

 attended to the several statements scattered about, but do not 

 believe in more than accidental coincidences. W. Hunter 

 told my father, then in a lying-in hospital, that in many 

 thousand cases, he had asked the mother, before her confine- 

 ment, whether anything had affected her imagination, and re- 

 corded the answers ; and absolutely not one case came right, 

 though, when the child was anything remarkable, they after- 

 wards made the cap to fit. Reproduction seems governed by 

 such similar laws in the whole animal kingdom, that I am 

 most loth [to believe]. . . . 



C. Darwin to J. M. Herbert. 



Down [1844 or 1845]. 



MY DEAR HERBERT, I was very glad to see your hand- 

 writing and hear a bit of news about you. Though you can- 

 not come here this autumn, I do hope you and Mrs. Herbert 

 will come in the winter, and we will have lots of talk of old 

 times, and lots of Beethoven. 



the late Robert Chambers. My father's copy gives signs of having been 

 carefully read, a long list of marked passages being pinned in at the end. 

 One useful lesson he seems to have learned from it. He writes : " The 

 idea of a fish passing into a reptile, monstrous. I will not specify any 

 genealogies much too little known at present." He refers again to the 

 book in a letter to Fox, February, 1845 : *' Have you read that strange, 

 unphilosophical, but capitally-written book, the ' Vestiges ' : it has made 

 more talk than any work of late, and has been by some attributed to me- 

 at which I ought to be much flattered and unflattered." 



* This refers to the case of a relative of Sir J. Hooker's, who insisted 

 that a mole, which appeared on one of her children, was the effect of fright 

 upon herself on having, before the birth of the child, blotted with sepia 

 a copy of Turner's ' Liber Studiorum ' that had been lent to her with spe- 

 cial injunctions to be careful. 



