32 PUBLICATION OF THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' [1859. 



C. Darwin to C. LyelL 



Ilkley, Yorkshire, 



December 2nd [1859]. 



MY DEAR LYELL, Every note which you have sent me 

 has interested me much. Pray thank Lady Lyell for her 

 remark. In the chapters she refers to, I was unable to .mod- 

 ify the passage in accordance with your suggestion ; but in 

 the final chapter I have modified three or four. Kingsley, in 

 a note * to me, had a capital paragraph on such notions as 

 mine being not opposed to a high conception of the Deity. 

 I have inserted it 'as an extract from a letter to me from a 

 celebrated author and divine. I have put in about nascent 

 organs. I had the greatest difficulty in partially making out 

 Sedgwick's letter, and I dare say I did greatly underrate its 

 clearness. Do what I could, I fear I shall be greatly abused. 

 In answer to Sedgwick's remark that my book would be 

 -<t mischievous," I asked him whether truth can be known ex- 

 cept by being victorious over all attacks. But it is no use. 

 H. C. Watson tells me that one zoologist says he will read 

 my book, "but I will never believe it." What a spirit to 

 read any book in ! Crawford writes to me that his notice f 

 will be hostile, but that " he will not calumniate the author." 

 He says he has read my book, " at least such parts as he 

 could understand." He sent me some notes and sugges- 

 tions (quite unimportant), and they show me that I have un- 

 avoidably done harm to the subject, by publishing an ab- 

 stract. He is a real Pallasian ; nearly all our domestic 

 races descended from a multitude of wild species now com- 



* The letter is given at p. 82. 



f John Crawford, orientalist, ethnologist, &c., b. 1783, d. 1868. The 

 review appeared in the Examiner, and, though hostile, is free from bigotry, 

 as the following citation will show : " We cannot help saying that piety 

 must be fastidious indeed that objects to a theory the tendency of which 

 is to show that all organic beings, man included, are in a perpetual prog- 

 ress of amelioration, and that is expounded in the reverential language 

 which we have quoted." 



