1 862.] FALCONER ON SPECIES. 389 



remember well feeling much hesitation about putting in even 

 the guarded sentences which I did. My doubts, I remember, 

 related to the rate of change of the Radiata in the Secondary 

 formation, and of the Foraminifera in the oldest Tertiary 



beds 



Good night, 



C. DARWIN. 



C. Darwin to C. Lyell. 



Down, Oct. i [1862]. 



.... I found here * a short and very kind note of Fal- 

 coner, with some pages of his ' Elephant Memoir/ which will 

 be published, in which he treats admirably on long persistence 

 of type. I thought he was going to make a good and crush- 

 ing attack on me, but, to my great satisfaction, he ends by 

 pointing out a loophole, and adds,f "with him I have no faith 

 that the mammoth and other extinct elephants made their 



appearance suddenly The most rational view seems 



to be that they are the modified descendants of earlier pro- 

 genitors, &c." This is capital. There will not be soon one 

 good palaeontologist who believes in immutability. Falconer 

 does not allow for the Proboscidean group being a failing one, 

 and therefore not likely to be giving off new races. 



He adds that he does not think Natural Selection suffices. 

 I do not quite see the force of his argument, and he appa- 

 rently overlooks that I say over and over again that Natural 

 Selection can do nothing without variability, and that varia- 

 bility is subject to the most complex fixed laws 



[In his letters to Sir J. D. Hooker, about the end of this 



* On his return from Bourne- clearer. The passage begins as 



mouth. follows : " The inferences which I 



t Falconer, " On the American draw from these facts are not op- 

 Fossil Elephant," in the ' Nat. Hist, posed to one of the leading pro- 

 Review,' 1863, p. 8r. The words positions of Darwin's theory. With 

 preceding those cited by my father him," c. &c. 

 make the meaning of his quotation 



