OPPOSITION. 157 



they had grown up. Darwin thoroughly understood 

 this, and, writing to his friends, maintained .that the 

 fate of his views was in the hands of the younger 

 men. 



A grand yet simple conception like that of 

 natural selection, explaining and connecting together 

 innumerable facts which people had previously 

 explained differently, or had become accustomed to 

 regard as inexplicable, must always remain as a 

 stumbling-block to the majority of those who have 

 reached or passed middle life before its first appear- 

 ance. 



Hardly anything is more characteristic of Darwin 

 than the tone with which he wrote to acknowledged 

 opponents. Thus his letters to L. Agassiz (1868), 

 Quatrefages (1869 or 1870), and Fabre (1880), are 

 models of the way in which a correspondence which 

 would present peculiar difficulties to most people 

 may be conducted. In these letters there is not the 

 least attempt to slur over or minimise the points of 

 wide difference ; on the contrary, they are most 

 candidly stated, but with so much respect and 

 sympathy, and with such marked appreciation of the 

 knowledge he had gained from his correspondent, 

 that the reader must have regretted the divergence 

 of opinion as greatly as the writer. 



Tyndall has given a very interesting and pathetic 

 account of the evident distress with which Professor 

 L. Agassiz, chief of the opponents of Darwin in 



