i860.] WOELASTON'S REVIEW. yg 



thanks him for his kind manner of speaking about him. I 

 have also told him that he would be pleased to hear that the 

 Bishop of Oxford says it is the most unphilosophical * work 

 he ever read. The review seems to me clever, and only mis- 

 interprets me in a few places. Like all hostile men, he passes 

 over the explanation given of Classification, Morphology, 

 Embryology, and Rudimentary Organs, &c. I read Wallace's 

 paper in MS.,f and thought it admirably good ; he does not 

 know that he has been anticipated about the depth of inter- 

 vening sea determining distribution. . . . The most curious 

 point in the paper seems to me that about the African charac- 

 ter of the Celebes productions, but I should require further 

 confirmation. . . . 



Henslow is staying here ; I have had some talk with him ; 

 he is in much the same state as Bunbury, J and will go a very 

 little way with us, but brings up no real argument against 

 going further. He also shudders at the eye ! It is really 

 curious (and perhaps is an argument in our favour) how differ- 

 ently different opposers view the subject. Henslow used to 

 rest his opposition on the imperfection of the Geological Rec- 

 ord, but he now thinks nothing of this, and says I have got 

 well out of it ; I wish I could quite agree with him. Baden 

 Powell says he never read anything so conclusive as my state- 

 ment about the eye ! ! A stranger writes to me about sexual 

 selection, and regrets that I boggle about such a trifle as the 

 brush of hair on the male turkey, and so on. As L. Jenyns 

 has a really philosophical mind, and as you say you like to 

 see everything, I send an old letter of his. In a later letter 

 to Henslow, which I have seen, he is more candid than any 

 opposer I have heard of, for he says, though he cannot go so 

 far as I do, yet he can give no good reason why he should not. 



* Another version of the words is given by Lyell, to whom they were 

 spoken, viz. " the most illogical book ever written." — ' Life,' vol. ii. p. 358. 



f " On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago." — Linn. 

 Soc. Journ. i860. 



X The late Sir Charles Bunbury, well known as a Palaeo-botanist 



