242 ORIGIN OF SPECIES. [Ch. XIH. 



never could do), I fully believe that our cause will, ia the long- 

 run, prevail. I am glad I was not in Oxford, for I should have 

 been overwhelmed, with my [health] in its present state. 



O. D. to J. D. Booker. [July i860.] 



... I have just read the Quarterly. * It is uncommonly 

 clever ; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, 



* Quarterly Review, July 1860. The article in question was by 

 Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and was afterwards published in his 

 Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review, 1874. In the Life and 

 Letters, ii. p. 182, Mr. Huxley has given some account of this article. 

 I quote a few lines : — *' Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the 

 world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender 

 to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of 

 the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid 

 of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a ' flighty * 

 person, who endeavours ' to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and 

 speculation,' and whose 'mode of dealing with nature' is reprobated 

 as 'utterly dishonourable to Natural 8cience.'" The passage from 

 the Anti-Jacobin, referred to in the letter, gives the history of the 

 evolution of space from the ■ primseval point or punctum saliens of 

 the universe," which is conceived to have moved " forward in a right 

 line, ad infinitum, till it grew tired ; after which the right line, which it 

 had generated, would begin to put itself in motion in a lateral direction, 

 describing an area of infinite extent. This area, as soon as it became 

 conscious of its own existence, would begin to ascend or descend 

 according as its specific gravity would determine it, forming an immense 

 solid space filled with vacuum, and capable of containing the present 

 universe." 



The following (p. 263) may serve as an example of the passages in 

 which the reviewer refers to Sir Charles Lyell: — "That Mr. Darwin 

 should have wandered from this broad highway of nature's works into 

 the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. We trust that he is 

 mistaken in believing that he may count Sir 0. Lyell as one of his 

 converts. We know, indeed, the strength of the temptations which he 

 can bring to bear upon his geological brother. . . . Yet no man has been 

 more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of 

 species than Sir C. Lyell, and that not in the infancy of his scientific 

 life, but in its full vigour and maturity." The Bishop goes on to appeal 

 to Lyell, in order that with his help " this flimsy speculation may be as 

 completely put down as was what in spite of all denials we must venture 

 to call its twin though less instructed brother, the Vestiges of Creation." 



With reference to this article, Mr. Brodie Innes, my father's old friend 

 and neighbour, writes : — " Most men would have been annoyed by an 

 article written with the Bishop's accustomed vigour, a mixture of argument 

 and ridicule. Mr. Darwin was writing on some parish matter, and put a 

 postscript — 'If you have not seen the last Quarterly, do get it; the 

 Bishop of Oxford has made such capital fun of me and my grandfather.' 

 By a curious coincidence, when I received the letter, I was staying in the 

 same house with the Bishop, and showed it to him. He said, ' I am very 

 glad he takes it in that way, he is such a capital fellow.' " 



