2o6 SPREAD OF EVOLUTION. [1863. 



I suspect that if you had inserted a few more superlatives 

 in speaking of the several authors there would have been 

 none of this horrid noise. No one, I am sure, who knows you 

 could doubt about your hearty sympathy with every one who 

 makes any little advance in science. I still well remember my 

 surprise at the manner in which you listened to me in Hart 

 Street on my return from the Beagle's voyage. You did me 

 a world of good. It is horridly vexatious that so frank and 

 apparently amiable a man as Falconer should have behaved 

 so.* Well it will all soon be forgotten. . . . 



[In reply to the above-mentioned letter of my father's 

 to the Athenceum, an article appeared in that Journal (May 

 2nd, 1863, p. 586), accusing my father of claiming for his 

 views the exclusive merit of " connecting by an intelligible 

 thread of reasoning " a number of facts in morphology, &c. 

 The writer remarks that, " The different generalizations cited 

 by Mr. Darwin as being connected by an intelligible thread 

 of reasoning exclusively through his attempt to explain 

 specific transmutation are in fact related to it in this wise, 

 that they have prepared the minds of naturalists for a better 

 reception of such attempts to explain the way of the origin of 

 species from species." 



To this my father replied in the Athenaum of May 9th, 

 1863 :] 



Down, May 5 [1863]. 



I hope that you will grant me space to own that your 

 reviewer is quiet correct when he states that any theory of 

 descent will connect, " by an intelligible thread of reasoning," 

 the several generalizations before specified. I ought to have 

 made this admission expressly; with the reservation, how- 



But all this squabbling will greatly sink scientific men. I have seen sneers 

 already in the Times." 



* It is to this affair that the extract from a letter to Falconer, given 

 vol. i. p. 134, refers. 



