

lS6o.] CLERICAL OPINIONS. 289 



word directly agiinst religion or tli2 clergy ; but if you were 

 to read a little pamphlet which I received a couple of days 

 ago by a clergyman, you would laugh, and admit that I had 

 some excuse for bitterness. After abusing me for two or three 

 pages, in language sufficiently plain and emphatic to have 

 satisfied any reasonable man, he sums up by saying that h^ 

 has vainly searched the English language to find terms to 

 express his contempt for me and all Darwinians.' In another 

 letter, after I had left Down, he writes, ' We often differed, 

 but you are one of those rare mortals from whom one can 

 differ and yet feel no shade of animosity, and that is a thing 

 [of] which I should feel very proud, if any one could say [it] 

 of me.' 



" On my last visit to Down, Mr. Darwin said, at his dinner- 

 table, ' Brodie Innes and I have been fast friends for thirty 

 years, and we never thoroughly agreed on any subject but 

 once, and then we stared hard at each other, and thought one 

 of us must be very ill.' "] 



C. Darwin to C. Lyell. 



Down, February 23rd [1860]. 



MY DEAR LYELL, That is a splendid answer of the father 

 of Judge Crompton. How curious that the Judge should have 

 hit on exactly the same points as yourself. It shows me what 

 a capital lawyer you would have made, how many unjust acts 

 you would have made appear just ! But how much grander a 

 field has science been than the law, though the latter might 

 have made you Lord Kinnordy. I will, if there be another 

 edition, enlarge on gradation in the eye, and on all forms 

 coming from one prototype, so as to try and make both less 

 glaringly improbable. . . . 



With respect to Bronn's objection that it cannot be shown 

 how life arises, and likewise to a certain extent Asa Gray's 

 remark that natural selection is not a vera causa, I was much 



VOL. II. U 



