96 
PROFESSOR OWEN 
CH. III. 
a word I would wish to keep back. The second 
publication was in consequence of a complaint to 
the editor of some glaring misprints — e.g. your 
name being put for that of Oken, &c., &c. I never 
asserted that creation (or the appearance of a new 
or modified fauna) was not by law. But by what 
law ? Not, I may say, of natural transmutation — 
not by turning fishes into reptiles, whales into 
pachyderms, or monkeys into men, in the way 
of natural generation, but by a higher law, of 
which we may reach the conception hereafter, 
as you have reached the conception of an 
archetypal form. But that conception does not 
mutilate (it rather magnifies and consolidates) our 
conceptions of final causes and of a Creator. Our 
conception of law is, in most cases, only a concep- 
tion of a certain definite succession of phenomena ; 
but in every case there lurks behind the word 
law a conception of a higher kind — of an ordinary 
and sustaining power exterior to the phenomena 
themselves. But I have no time, or head, now 
for such discussion. Do you know who was the 
author of the article in the “ Edinburgh ” on the 
subject of Darwin’s theory.? On the whole, I 
think it very good. I once suspected that you 
must have had a hand in it, and I then abandoned 
that thought. I have not read it with any care. I 
must conclude or miss the post. 
‘ Yours ever, 
‘ A. Sedgwick.’ 
