CRITICS RELEVANT AND IRRELEVANT 515 
show how powerful the book must be felt to be. You 
and Asa Gray are models of prudent dissentients. Clark, 
Phillips, Haughton, Sedgwick, Whately seem to me all to 
be heside the mark, they cannot appreciate the subject, are 
not naturalists, and have no real understanding of the funda- 
mentals of Nat. Hist. 
Edinburgh opinion, led by Balfour, the Professor of Botany, 
was also in opposition. The following extracts are from letters 
to Anderson, Hooker's Calcutta friend, who was then in 
Edinburgh. 
Only think of five Reviews taking up Darwin in one month, 
viz.. Quarterly, British Do., Edinburgh, Frazer's, N. British, 
Nothing but the super-excellence of the book and of its theory 
could command such attention ; tell this to the Edinenses ! 
I hope you have read Owen's review in the Edinburgh. 
I should think it must add gall to the Balfourians' bitterness 
of spirit, for not content with snubbing me and spitefully 
entreating Darwin and Huxley, the cool fish hedges for a 
transmutation view of his own ! 
The following letters to his old friend Harvey illustrate 
his attitude towards a fellow botanist — perhaps a systematist 
rather than a generaliser — who could appreciate the scientific 
arguments involved, but who was strongly moved by questions 
of religious metaphysics and the suspicion that Darwin had 
ascribed too great efficacy to secondary causes and, as it were, 
deified Natural Selection. He had refrained from reading the 
' Origin ' until his lectures should be over and himself at leisure. 
He had, however, written in the Gardeners' Chronicle, February 
18, 1860, on a monstrous sport of Begonia frigida so different 
from the normal type that it might have typified a distinct 
natural order. This he adduced as an objection to the theory 
of natural selection, which supposed changes not to take 
place per saltum. Hooker replied in the next number of the 
Gardeners' Chronicle, showing that a fallacy underlay this 
example. 
Harvey had also written and privately printed a serio- 
comic squib on Darwin for the Dublin University Zoological 
