328 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHA1>. XVI 



series of investigations into the structure of birds. 

 There is a reference to this in a very interesting 

 letter dealing chiefly with what he conceived to be 

 the cardinal point of the Darwinian theory : 



26 ABBEY PLACE, Sept. 4, 1861. 



MY DEAR HOOKER Yesterday being the first day I 

 went to the Athenaeum after reading your note, I had a 

 look at, and a good laugh over, the Quarterly article. 

 Who can be the writer ? 



I have been so busy studying chicken development, a 

 difficult subject to which I had long ago made up my 

 mind to devote my first spare time, that I have written 

 you no word about your article in the Gardener's Chronicle. 

 I quite agree with the general tendency of your argument, 

 though it seems to me that you put your view rather too 

 strongly when you seem to question the position " that, 

 as a rule, resemblances prevail over differences " between 

 parent and offspring. Surely, as a rule, resemblances 

 do prevail over differences, though I quite agree with you 

 that the latter have been far too much overlooked. The 

 great desideratum for the species question at present 

 seems to me to be the determination of the law of 

 variation. Because no law has yet been made out, Darwin 

 is obliged to speak of variation as if it were spontaneous 

 or a matter of chance, so that the bishops and superior 

 clergy generally (the only real atheists and believers in 

 chance left in the world) gird at him as if he were 

 another Lucretius. 



It is [in] the recognition of a tendency to variation 

 apart from the variation of what are ordinarily understood 

 as external conditions that Darwin's view is such an 

 advance on Lamarck. Why does not somebody go to 

 work experimentally, and get at the law of variation for 

 some one species of plant 1 



What a. capital article that was in the Athenceum the 



