seen most clearly that if any concession is made, all that you claim in
your concluding pages will follow. It is this which has made me so long
hesitate, always feeling that the case of Man and his races, and of other
animals, and that of plants is one and the same, and that if a "vera causa"
be admitted for one, instead of a purely unknown and imaginary one, such as
the word "Creation," all the consequences must follow.

I fear I have not time to-day, as I am just leaving this place, to indulge
in a variety of comments, and to say how much I was delighted with Oceanic
Islands--Rudimentary Organs--Embryology--the genealogical key to the
Natural System, Geographical Distribution, and if I went on I should be
copying the heads of all your chapters. But I will say a word of the
Recapitulation, in case some slight alteration, or at least, omission of a
word or two be still possible in that.

In the first place, at page 480, it cannot surely be said that the most
eminent naturalists have rejected the view of the mutability of species?
You do not mean to ignore G. St. Hilaire and Lamarck. As to the latter,
you may say, that in regard to animals you substitute natural selection for
volition to a certain considerable extent, but in his theory of the changes
of plants he could not introduce volition; he may, no doubt, have laid an
undue comparative stress on changes in physical conditions, and too little
on those of contending organisms. He at least was for the universal
mutability of species and for a genealogical link between the first and the
present. The men of his school also appealed to domesticated varieties.
(Do you mean LIVING naturalists?) (In the published copies of the first
edition, page 480, the words are "eminent living naturalists.")

The first page of this most important summary gives the adversary an
advantage, by putting forth so abruptly and crudely such a startling