216 PUBLICATION OF THE OBIGIN OF SPECIES. [Ch. XII. 



A. Sedgwick * to C. Darwin. [November 1859.] 



My dear Darwin, — I write to thank you for your work on 

 the Origin of Species. It came, I think, in the latter part of 

 last week ; but it may have come a few days sooner, and been 

 overlooked among my book-parcels, which often remain un- 

 opened when I am lazy or busy with any work before me. So 

 soon as I opened it I began to read it, and I finished it, after 

 many interruptions, on Tuesday. Yesterday I was employed — 

 1st, in preparing for my lecture ; 2ndly, in attending a meeting 

 of my brother Fellows to discuss the final propositions of the 

 Parliamentary Commissioners ; 3rdly, in lecturing ; 4thly, in 

 hearing the conclusion of the discussion and the College reply, 

 whereby, in conformity with my own wishes, we accepted the 

 scheme of the Commissioners ; 5thly, in dining with an old 

 friend at Clare College; 6thly, in adjourning to the weekly 

 meeting of the Kay Club, from which I returned at 10 p.m., 

 dog-tired, and hardly able to climb my staircase. Lastly, in 

 looking through the Times to see what was going on in the busy 

 world. 



I do not state this to fill space (though I believe that Nature 

 does abhor a vacuum), but to prove that my reply and my thanks 

 are sent to you by the earliest leisure I have, though that is but 

 a very contracted opportunity. If I did not think you a good- 

 tempered and truth-loving man, I should not tell you that 

 (spite of the great knowledge, store of facts, capital views of 

 the correlation of the various parts of organic nature, admirable 

 hints about the diffusion, through wide regions, of many related 

 organic beings, &C. &c.) I have read your book with more pain 

 than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly, parts I laughed 

 at till my sides were almost sore ; other parts I read with 

 absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false and 

 grievously mischievous. You have deserted — after a start in 

 that tram-road of all solid physical truth — the true method 

 of induction, and started us in machinery as wild, I think, as 

 Bishop Wilkins's locomotive that was to sail with us to the 

 moon. Many of your wide conclusions are based upon 

 assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why 

 then express them in the language and arrangement of philo- 

 sophical induction? As to your grand principle — natural 

 selection — what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, 

 or known, primary facts? Development is a better word, 



* Rev. Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian Professor of Geology in the 

 University of Cambridge. Born 1785, died 1873. 



