Ch. XII.] OCTOBER 1859, TO DECEMBER, 1859. 207 



important preliminary statement, which will admit, even before 

 your detailed proofs appear, of some occasional useful exempli- 

 fication, such as your pigeons and cirripedes, of which you 

 make such excellent use. 



I mean that, when, as I fully expect, a new edition is soon 

 called for, you may here and there insert an actual case to relieve 

 the vast number of abstract propositions. So far as I am 

 concerned, I am so well prepared to take your statements of 

 facts for granted, that I do not think the " pieces justificatives " 

 when published will mako much difference, and I have long 

 seen most clearly that if any concession is made, all that you 

 claim in your concluding pages will follow. It is this which 

 has made me so long hesitate, always feeling that the case of 

 Man and his races, and of other animals, and that of plants is 

 one and the same, and that if a " vera causa " be admitted for 

 one, instead of a purely unknown and imaginary one, such as 

 the word " Creation," all the consequences must follow. 



I fear I have not time to-day, as I am just leaving this 

 place to indulge in a variety of comments, and to say how 

 much I was delighted with Oceanic Islands — Rudimentary 

 Organs — Embryology — the genealogical key to the Natural 

 System, Geographical Distribution, and if I went on I should 

 be copying the heads of all your chapters. But I will say a 

 word of the Recapitulation, in case some slight alteration, or, 

 at least, omission of a word or two be still possible in that. 



In the first place, at p. 480, it cannot surely be said that 

 the most eminent naturalists have rejected the view of the 

 mutability of species? You do not mean to ignore G. St. 

 Hilaire and Lamarck. As to the latter, you may say, that in 

 regard to animals you substitute natural selection for volition 

 to a certain considerable extent, but in his theory of the 

 changes of plants he could not introduce volition ; he may, no 

 doubt, have laid an undue comparative stress on changes in 

 physical conditions, and too little on those of contending 

 organisms. He at least was for the universal mutability of 

 species and for a genealogical link between the first and the 

 present. The men of his school also appealed to domesticated 

 varieties. (Do you mean living naturalists ?) * 



The first page of this most important summary gives the 

 adversary an advantage, by putting forth so abruptly and 

 crudely such a startling objection as the formation of " the 



* In his next letter to Lyell my father writes : " The omission of 

 1 living ' before • eminent ' naturalists was a dreadful blunder." In the 

 first edition, as published, the blunder is corrected by the addition of the 

 word " living." 



