220 PUBLICATION OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. [Ch. XH 



weakest part. He said he had no particular objection to any 

 part. He added : — 



" If I must criticise, I should say, we do not want to know 

 what Darwin believes and is convinced of, but what he can 

 prove." I agreed most fully and truly that I have probably 

 greatly sinned in this line, and defended my general line of 

 argument of inventing a theory and seeing how many classes 

 of facts the theory would explain. I added that I would en- 

 deavour to modify the " believes " and " convinceds." He took 

 me up short : " You will then spoil your book, the charm of it 

 is that it is Darwin himself." He added another objection, that 

 the book was too teres atque rotundus — that it explained every- 

 thing, and that it was improbable in the highest degree that I 

 should succeed in this. I quite agree with this rather queer 

 objection, and it comes to this that my book must be veiy bad 

 or very good. . . . 



I have heard, by a roundabout channel, that Herschel says 

 my book " is the law of higgledy-piggledy." What this exactly 

 means I do not know, but it is evidently very contemptuous. If 

 true this is a great blow and discouragement. 



J. D. Hooker to C. Darwin. Kew [1859]. 



Deab Darwin,— You have, I know, been drenched with 

 letters since the publication of your book, and I have hence 

 forborne to add my mite.* I hope now that you are well 

 through Edition II., and I have heard that you were flourishing 

 in London. I have not yet got half-through tho book, not from 

 want of will, but of time — for it is the very hardest book to 

 read, to full profits, that I ever tried — it is so cram-full of 

 matter and reasoning, j" I am all the more glad that you have 

 published in this form, for the three volumes, unprefaced by 

 this, would have choked any Naturalist of the nineteenth 

 century, and certainly have softened my brain in the operation 

 of assimilating their contents. I am perfectly tired of marvel- 

 ling at the wonderful amount of facts you have brought to bear, 

 and your skill in marshalling them and throwing them on the 

 enemy ; it is also extremely clear as far as I have gone, but 

 very hard to fully appreciate. Somehow it reads very different 

 from the MS., and I often fancy that I must have been very 



* See, however, p. 211. 



f Mr. Huxley has made a similar remark : — " Long occupation with 

 the work has led the present writer to believe that the Origin of 

 Species is one of the hardest of books to master." — Obituary Notice, 

 Proc. E. Soc. No. 269, p. xvii. 



