FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES 83 



father's house on Paddington Green I met him two or three 

 times. He was so good as to send me that wonderfully 

 clever and original book, and also his less known satirical 

 religious story, " The Fair Haven," which was reviewed with 

 approval by some of the Church newspapers as a genuine 

 piece of biography, which it purports to be. He also sent me 

 "Life and Habit," and "Evolution Old and New," both of 

 which I reviewed in Nature in the year 1879. The former 

 is a wonderfully ingenious, brilliant, and witty application of 

 the theory of Haeckel and others, that every animal cell, or 

 even every organic molecule, is an independent conscious 

 organism, with its likes and dislikes, its habits and instincts 

 like the higher animals. He explains instincts as inherited 

 memories, which, at the time he wrote, was a permissible 

 hypothesis, but is now almost universally rejected as implying 

 the inheritance of acquired characters, which all the available 

 evidence is opposed to. The book, however, is well worth 

 reading for its extreme ingenuity, logical arrangement, and 

 all-pervading wit and humour. 



The other work is a very full and careful exposition of 

 the doctrines, as regards evolution, of Buffon, Lamarck, Dr. 

 Erasmus Darwin, Mr. Patrick Matthew, and some more recent 

 writers, with copious quotations from their works, and an 

 attempt to show not only that their views were of the same 

 general nature as those of Darwin, but were also of equal if 

 not greater importance. After reading the volume I wrote 

 the following letter to the author, which may be of interest to 

 those naturalists who either have not seen the work or who 

 have forgotten its essential features. 



" Waldron Edge, Duppas Hill, Croydon, 

 "May 9, 1879. 



" My Dear Sir, 



" Please accept my thanks for the copy of ' Evolution 

 Old and New,' and of ' Life and Habit,' which you were so 

 good as to send me. 



" I have just finished reading the former with mixed feel- 

 ings of pleasure and regret. I am glad that a connected 



