PER CONTRA. ^ 289 



US of this, and we were delighted. He knew we 

 should like his using the word "sag," so he used 

 it,* and we said it was beautiful. True, he used it 

 wrongly, for he was writing about tesselated pave- 

 ment, and builders assure me that " sag " is a word 

 which applies to timber only, but this is not to the 

 point; the point was, that Mr. Darwin should have 

 used a word that we did not understand; this showed 

 that he had a vast fund of knowledge at his command 

 about all sorts of practical details with which he 

 might have well been unacquainted. We do not deal 

 the same measure to man and to the lower animals 

 in the matter of intelligence ; the less we understand 

 these last, • the- less, we say, not we, but they can 

 understand; whereas the less we can understand a 

 man, the more intelligent we are apt to think him. 

 No one should neglect by-play of this description ; if I 

 live to be strong enough to carry it through, I mean 

 to play " cambre," and I shall spell it " camber." I 

 wonder Mr. Darwin never abused this word. Laugh 

 at him, however, as we may for having said " sag," if 

 he had not been the kind of man to know the value 

 of these little hits, neither would he have been the 

 kind of man to persuade us into first tolerating, and 

 then cordially accepting, descent with modification. 

 , There is a correlation of mental as well as of physical 

 growth, and we could not probably have had one set 

 of Mr. Darwin's qualities without the other. If he 

 had been liaore faultless, he. might have written better 

 books, but we should have listened worse. A book's 



* Formation of Vegetable Mould, &o., p. 217 Murray, 1882, 



T 



