48 Unconscious Memory 



did not do so. The original will soon appear in German, and 

 I believe will be a much larger book than the English one ; 

 for, with Dr. Krause's consent, many long extracts from 

 Miss Seward were omitted (as well as much other matter), 

 from being in my opinion superfluous for the English reader. 

 I believe that the omitted parts will appear as notes in the 

 German edition. Should there be a reprint of the English Life, 

 I will state that the original as it appeared in Kosnios was 

 modified by Dr. Krause before it was translated. I may add 

 that I had obtained Dr. Krause's consent for a translation, 

 and had arranged with Mr. Dallas before your book was 

 announced. I remember this because Mr. Dallas wrote to 

 tell me of the advertisement. — I remain, yours faithfully, 

 C. Darwin." 



This was not a letter I could accept. If Mr. Darwin 

 had said that by some inadvertence, which he was unable 

 to excuse or account for, a blunder had been made which 

 he would at once correct so far as was in his power by a 

 letter to the Times or the AthencBum, and that a notice of 

 the erratum should be printed on a flyleaf and pasted into 

 all unsold copies of the " Life of Erasmus Darwin," there 

 would have been no more heard about the matter from 

 me ; but when Mr. Darwin maintained that it was a 

 common practice to take advantage of an opportunity of 

 revising a work to interpolate a covert attack upon an 

 opponent, and at the same time to misdate the interpolated 

 matter by expressly stating that it appeared months 

 sooner than it actually did, and prior to the work which 

 it attacked ; when he maintained that what was being 

 done was " so common a practice that it never occurred " 

 to him — the writer of some twenty volumes — to do what 

 all literary men must know to be inexorably requisite, I 

 thought this was going far beyond what was permissible 

 in honourable warfare, and that it was time, in the interests 

 of literary and scientific morality, even more than in my 

 own, to appeal to public opinion. I was particularly 

 struck with the use of the words " it never occurred to me," 

 and felt how completely of a piece it was with the opening 

 paragraph of the " Origin of Species." It was not merely 



