Every note which you have sent me has interested me much. Pray thank Lady
Lyell for her remark. In the chapters she refers to, I was unable to
modify the passage in accordance with your suggestion; but in the final
chapter I have modified three or four. Kingsley, in a note (The letter is
given below) to me, had a capital paragraph on such notions as mine being
NOT opposed to a high conception of the Deity. I have inserted it as an
extract from a letter to me from a celebrated author and divine. I have
put in about nascent organs. I had the greatest difficulty in partially
making out Sedgwick's letter, and I dare say I did greatly underrate its
clearness. Do what I could, I fear I shall be greatly abused. In answer
to Sedgwick's remark that my book would be "mischievous," I asked him
whether truth can be known except by being victorious over all attacks.
But it is no use. H.C. Watson tells me that one zoologist says he will
read my book, "but I will never believe it." What a spirit to read any
book in! Crawford writes to me that his notice (John Crawford,
orientalist, ethnologist, etc., 1783-1868. The review appeared in the
"Examiner", and, though hostile, is free from bigotry, as the following
citation will show: "We cannot help saying that piety must be fastidious
indeed that objects to a theory the tendency of which is to show that all
organic beings, man included, are in a perpetual progress of amelioration,
and that is expounded in the reverential language which we have quoted.")
will be hostile, but that "he will not calumniate the author." He says he
has read my book, "at least such parts as he could understand." He sent me
some notes and suggestions (quite unimportant), and they show me that I
have unavoidably done harm to the subject, by publishing an abstract. He
is a real Pallasian; nearly all our domestic races descended from a
multitude of wild species now commingled. I expected Murchison to be
outrageous. How little he could ever have grappled with the subject of
denudation! How singular so great a geologist should have so