200 SPREAD OF EVOLUTION. [1863. 



lieves. I have no doubt his belief failed him as he wrote, for 

 I feel sure that at times he no more believed in Creation than 

 you or I. I have grumbled a bit in my answer to him at his 

 always classing my work as a modification of Lamarck's, 

 which it is no more than any author who did not believe in 

 immutability of species, and did believe in descent. I am 

 very sorry to hear from Lyell that Falconer is going to pub- 

 lish a formal reclamation of his own claims. . . . 



It is cruel to think of it, but we must go to Malvern in 

 the middle of April ; it is ruin to me.* . . . 



C. Darwin to C. Lyell. 



Down, March 17 [1863]. 



MY DEAR LYELL, I have been much interested by your 

 letters and enclosure, and thank you sincerely for giving me 

 so much time when you must be so busy. What a curious 

 letter from B. de P. [Boucher de Perthes]. He seems per- 

 fectly satisfied, and must be a very amiable man. I know 

 something about his errors, and looked at his book many 

 years ago, and am ashamed to think that I concluded the 

 whole was rubbish ! Yet he has done for man something 

 like what Agassiz did for glaciers.f 



I cannot say that I agree with Hooker about the public 

 not liking to be told what to conclude, if coming from one in 

 your position. But I am heartily sorry that I was led to make 

 complaints, or something very like complaints, on the man- 

 ner in which you have treated the subject, and still more so 

 anything about myself. I steadily endeavour never to forget 

 my firm belief that no one can at all judge about his own 



* He went to Hartfield in Sussex, on April 27, and to Malvern in the 

 autumn. 



f In his ' Antiquites Celtiques' (1847), Boucher de Perthes described 

 the flint tools found at Abbeville with bones of rhinoceros, hyaena, &c. 

 " But the scientific world had no faith in the statement that works of art, 

 however rude, had been met with in undisturbed beds of such antiquity." 

 (' Antiquity of Man,' first edition, p. 95). 



