4 PUBLICATION OF THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' [1859. 



objectionableness of these sentences if you have not time to 

 recast and amplify. 



.... But these are small matters, mere spots on the sun. 

 Your comparison of the letters retained in words, when no 

 longer wanted for the sound, to rudimentary organs is excel- 

 lent, as both are truly genealogical. 



The want of peculiar birds in Madeira is a greater diffi- 

 culty than seemed to me allowed for. I could cite passages 

 where you show that variations are superinduced from the 

 new circumstances of new colonists, which would require 

 some Madeira birds, like those of the Galapagos, to be pe- 

 culiar. There has been ample time in the case of Madeira 

 and Porto Santo. . . . 



You enclose your sheets in old MS., so the Post Office 

 very properly charge them as letters, 2d. extra. I wish all 

 their fines on MS. were worth as much. I paid 4.?. 6d 

 for such wash the other day from Paris, from a man who 

 can prove 300 deluges in the valley of Seine. 



With my hearty congratulations to you on your grand 

 work, believe me, 



Ever very affectionately yours, 



Chas. Lyell. 



C. Darwin to C. Lyell. 



Ilkley, Yorkshire, 



October nth [1859]. 



My dear Lyell, — I thank you cordially for giving me so 

 much of your valuable time in writing me the long letter of 

 3d, and still longer of 4th. I wrote a line with the missing 

 proof-sheet to Scarborough. I have adopted most thankfully 

 all your minor corrections in the last chapter, and the greater 

 ones as far as I could with little trouble. I damped the 

 opening passage about the eye (in my bigger work I show 

 the gradations in structure of the eye) by putting merely 

 "complex organs." But you are a pretty Lord Chancellor to 



