on Tuesday. Yesterday I was employed--1st, in preparing for my lecture;
2ndly, in attending a meeting of my brother Fellows to discuss the final
propositions of the Parliamentary Commissioners; 3rdly, in lecturing;
4thly, in hearing the conclusion of the discussion and the College reply,
whereby, in conformity with my own wishes, we accepted the scheme of the
Commissioners; 5thly, in dining with an old friend at Clare College; 6thly,
in adjourning to the weekly meeting of the Ray Club, from which I returned
at 10 P.M., dog-tired, and hardly able to climb my staircase. Lastly, in
looking through the "Times" to see what was going on in the busy world.

I do not state this to fill space (though I believe that Nature does abhor
a vacuum), but to prove that my reply and my thanks are sent to you by the
earliest leisure I have, though that is but a very contracted opportunity.
If I did not think you a good-tempered and truth-loving man, I should not
tell you that (spite of the great knowledge, store of facts, capital views
of the correlation of the various parts of organic nature, admirable hints
about the diffusion, through wide regions of many related organic beings,
etc., etc.) I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts of
it I admired greatly, parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore;
other parts I read with absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false
and grievously mischievous. You have DESERTED--after a start in that tram-
road of all solid physical truth--the true method of induction, and started
us in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins's locomotive that was
to sail with us to the moon. Many of your wide conclusions are based upon
assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved, why then express
them in the language and arrangement of philosophical induction? As to
your grand principle--NATURAL SELECTION--what is it but a secondary
consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts! Development is a better
word, because more close to the cause of the fact? For you do not deny
causation. I call (in the abstract) causation the will of God; and I can