Ch. XIII.] REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS, 1860. 231 



G. D. to Asa Gray. Down, April 3 [I860]. 



.... I remember well the time when the thought of the eye 

 made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the 

 complaint, and now small trifling particulars of structure often 

 make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a pea- 

 cock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick I . . . 



You may like to hear about reviews on my book. Sedg- 

 wick (as I and Lyell feel certain from internal evidence) has 

 reviewed me savagely and unfairly in the Spectator.* The 

 notice includes much abuse, and is hardly fair in several 

 respects. He would actually lead any one, who was ignorant 

 of geology, to suppose that I had invented the great gaps 

 between successive geological formations, instead of its being 

 an almost universally admitted dogma. But my dear old 

 friend Sedgwick, with his noble heart, is old, and is rabid with 

 indignation. . . . There has been one prodigy of a review, 

 namely, an opposed one (by Pictet,f the palaeontologist, in 

 the Bib. Universelle of Geneva) which is perfectly fair and 

 just, and I agree to every word he says ; our only difference 

 being that he attaches less weight to arguments in favour, 

 and more to arguments opposed, than I do. Of all the 

 opposed reviews, I think this the only quite fair one, and I 

 never expected to see one. Please observe that I do not class 

 your review by any means as opposed, though you think so 

 yourself ! It has done me much too good service ever to appear 

 in that rank in my eyes. But I fear I shall weary you with 

 so much about my book. I should rather think there was a 

 good chance of my becoming the most egotistical man in all 

 Europe 1 What a proud pre-eminence 1 Well, you have 

 helped to make me so, and therefore you must forgive me if 

 you can. 



My dear Gray, ever yours most gratefully. 



Science as a profession. He became lecturer on Botany at the Bristol 

 School of Medicine, and in 1849 he was appointed Director of the Botanic 

 Gardens at Peradeniya, which he made " the most beautiful tropical 

 garden in the world." He is best known through his important discovery 

 of conjugation in the Diatomaceffl (1847). His Enumeratio Plantarum 

 Zeylanise (1858-64) was " the first complete account, on modem lines, of 

 any definitely circumscribed tropical area." (From a notice in Nature, 

 October 26, 18S2.) 



* Spectator, March 24, 1860. There were favourable notices of the 

 Origin by Huxley in the Westminster Review, and Carpenter in the 

 Medico-Chir. Review, both in the April numbers. 



t Francois Jules Pictet, in the Archives des Sciences de la Bibliotheqm 

 Universelle, Mars 1860. 



