334 LIFE AT DOWN. VETAT. 33-45. [l844~5- 



believe in more than accidental coincidences. W. Hunter told 

 my father, then in a lying-in hospital, that in many thousand 

 cases, he had asked the mother, before tier confinement, whether 

 anything had affected her imagination, and recorded the 

 answers ; and absolutely not one case came right, though, 

 when the child was anything remarkable, they afterwards 

 made the cap to fit. Reproduction seems governed by such 

 similar laws in the whole animal kingdom, that I am most 

 loth [to believe]. . . . 



C. Danvin to J. M. Herbert. 



Down, [1844 or 1845]. 



MY DEAR HERBERT, I was very glad to see your hand- 

 writing and hear a bit of news about you. Though you cannot 

 come here this autumn, I do hope you and Mrs. Herbert will 

 come in the winter, and we will have lots of talk of old times, 

 and lots of Beethoven. 



I have little or rather nothing to say about myself ; we live 

 like clock-work, and in what most people would consider the 

 dullest possible manner. I have of late been slaving extra 

 hard, to the great discomfiture of wretched digestive organs, 

 at South America, and thank all the fates, I have done three- 

 fourths of it. Writing plain English grows with me more 

 and more difficult, and never attainable. As for your pre- 

 tending that you will read anything so dull as my pure 

 geological descriptions, lay not such a flattering unction on 

 my soul * for it is incredible. I have long discovered that 

 geologists never read each other's works, and that the only 

 object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness, and that 

 you do not form your opinions without undergoing labour of 



* On the same subject he wrote propose to read it it is purely 



to Fitz-Roy : " I have sent my geological. I said to my brother, 



1 South American Geology ' to Dover ' You will of course read it,' and his 



Street, and you will get it, no doubt, answer was, ' Upon my life, I would 



in the course of time. You do not sooner even buy it.' " 

 know what you threaten when you 



