i862 MAjVS place IN NATURE 



215 



Of course I shall be delighted to discuss anything with 

 you,* and the more so as I mean to put the whole question 

 before the world in another shape in my little book, whose title 

 is announced as Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature. I have 

 written the first two essays, the second containing the sub- 

 stance of my Edinburgh Lecture. I recollect you once asked me 

 for something to quote on the Man question, so if you want 

 anything in that way the MS. is at your service. 



Lyell looked over the proofs, and the following letters 

 are in reply to his criticisms : — 



Ardrishaig, Loch Fyne, Aug: 17, 1862. 



My dear Sir Charles — I take advantage of my first quiet 

 day to reply to your letter of the 9th ; and in the first place let 

 me thank you very much for your critical remarks, as I shall 

 find them of great service. 



With regard to such matters as verbal mistakes, you must 

 recollect that the greater part of the proof was wholly uncor- 

 rected. But the reader might certainly do his work better. I 

 do not think you will find room to complain of any want of dis- 

 tinctness in my definition of Owen's position touching the Hip- 

 pocampus question. I mean to give the whole history of the 

 business in a note, so that the paraphrase of Sir Ph. Egerton's 

 line " To which Huxley replies that Owen he lies," shall be un- 

 mistakable.! 



I will take care about the Cheiroptera, and I will look at 

 Lamarck again. But I doubt if I shall improve my estimate of 

 the latter. The notion of common descent was not his — still 

 less that of modification by variation — and he was as far as De 

 Maillet from seeing his way to any vera causa by which varieties 

 might be intensified into species. 



If Darwin is right about natural selection — the discovery of 

 this vera causa sets him to my mind in a different region alto- 

 gether from all his predecessors — and I should no more call his 

 doctrine a modification of Lamarck's than I should call the 

 Newtonian theory of the celestial motions a modification of the 

 Ptolemaic system. Ptolemy imagined a mode of explaining 

 those motions. Newton proved their necessity from the laws 

 and a force demonstrably in operation. If he is only right Dar- 



* Referring to the address on "Geological Contemporaneity" 

 delivered in 1862 at the Geological Society, see p. 220. 

 f See p. 206. 

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