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SIR C. LYELL TO A.R. WALLACE


_73 Harley Street. April 4, 1867._

My dear Mr. Wallace,--I have been reading over again your paper
published in 1855 in the _Annals_ on "The Law which has regulated the
Introduction of New Species"; passages of which I intend to quote, not
in reference to your priority of publication, but simply because there
are some points laid down more clearly than I can find in the work of
Darwin itself, in regard to the bearing of the geological and zoological
evidence on geographical distribution and the origin of species. I have
been looking into Darwin's historical sketch thinking to find some
allusion to your essay at page xx., 4th ed., when he gets to 1855, but I
can find no allusion to it. Yet surely I remember somewhere a passage in
which Darwin says in print that you had told him that in 1855 you meant
by such expressions as "species being created on the type of
pre-existing ones closely allied," and by what you say of modified
prototypes, and by the passage in which you ask "what rudimentary organs
mean if each species has been created independently," etc., that new
species were created by variation and in the way of ordinary generation.

Your last letter was a great help to me, for it was a relief to find
that the Lombok barrier was not so complete as to be a source of
difficulty. I have also to thank you for your papers, one of which I had
read before in the _Natural History Review_, but I am very glad of a
separate copy. I am rather perplexed by Darwin speculating on the