objection as the formation of "the eye," not by means analogous to man's
reason, or rather by some power immeasurably superior to human reason, but
by superinduced variation like those of which a cattle-breeder avails
himself. Pages would be required thus to state an objection and remove it.
It would be better, as you wish to persuade, to say nothing. Leave out
several sentences, and in a future edition bring it out more fully.
Between the throwing down of such a stumbling-block in the way of the
reader, and the passage to the working ants, in page 460, there are pages
required; and these ants are a bathos to him before he has recovered from
the shock of being called upon to believe the eye to have been brought to
perfection, from a state of blindness or purblindness, by such variations
as we witness. I think a little omission would greatly lessen the
objectionableness of these sentences if you have not time to recast and
amplify.

...But these are small matters, mere spots on the sun. Your comparison of
the letters retained in words, when no longer wanted for the sound, to
rudimentary organs is excellent, as both are truly genealogical.

The want of peculiar birds in Madeira is a greater difficulty than seemed
to me allowed for. I could cite passages where you show that variations
are superinduced from the new circumstances of new colonists, which would
require some Madeira birds, like those of the Galapagos, to be peculiar.
There has been ample time in the case of Madeira and Porto Santo...

You enclose your sheets in old MS., so the Post Office very properly charge
them as letters, 2 pence extra. I wish all their fines on MS. were worth
as much. I paid 4 shillings 6 pence for such wash the other day from
Paris, from a man who can prove 300 deluges in the valley of the Seine.