i860.] THE GALAPAGOS. 



productions no doubt, where man preserves some abrupt 

 change in structure. It amused me to see Sir R. Murchison 

 quoted as a judge of affinities of animals, and it gave me a 

 cold shudder to hear of any one speculating about a true 

 crustacean giving birth to a true fish ! * 



Yours most truly, 



C. DARWIN. 



C. Darwin tv C. Lyell. 



Down, September ist [1860]. 



MY DEAR LYELL, I have been much interested by your 

 letter of the 28th, received this morning. It has delighted 'me, 

 because it demonstrates that you have thought a good deal 

 lately on Natural Selection. Few things have surprised me 

 more than the entire paucity of objections and difficulties 

 new to me in the published reviews. Your remarks are of 

 a different stamp and new to me. I will run through them, 

 and make a few pleadings such as occur to me. 



I put in the possibility of the Galapagos having been con- 

 tinuously joined to America, out of mere subservience to the 

 many who believe in Forbes's doctrine, and did not see the 

 danger of admission, about small mammals surviving there 

 in such case. The case of the Galapagos, from certain facts 

 on littoral sea-shells (viz. Pacific Ocean and South American 

 littoral species), in fact convinced me more than in any other 

 case of other islands, that the Galapagos had never been 

 continuously united with the mainland ; it was mere base 

 subservience, and terror of Hooker and Co. 



With respect to atolls, I think mammals would hardly sur- 

 vive very long, even if the main islands (for as I have said in 

 the Coral Book, the outline of groups of atolls do not look 



* Parson's, loc. cit. p. 5, speaking of Pterichthys and Cephalaspis, says ' 

 " Now is it too much to infer from these facts that either of these animals, 

 if a crustacean, was so nearly a fish that some of its ova may have become 

 fish ; or, if itself a fish, was so nearly a crustacean that it may have been 

 born from the ovum of a crustacean ? " 



