With my hearty congratulations to you on your grand work, believe me,

Ever very affectionately yours,
CHAS. LYELL.


CHARLES DARWIN TO C. LYELL.
Ilkley, Yorkshire,
October 11th [1859].

My dear Lyell,

I thank you cordially for giving me so much of your valuable time in
writing me the long letter of 3d, and still longer of 4th. I wrote a line
with the missing proof-sheet to Scarborough. I have adopted most
thankfully all your minor corrections in the last chapter, and the greater
ones as far as I could with little trouble. I damped the opening passage
about the eye (in my bigger work I show the gradations in structure of the
eye) by putting merely "complex organs." But you are a pretty Lord
Chancellor to tell the barrister on one side how best to win the cause!
The omission of "living" before eminent naturalists was a dreadful blunder.

MADEIRA AND BERMUDA BIRDS NOT PECULIAR.

You are right, there is a screw out here; I thought no one would have
detected it; I blundered in omitting a discussion, which I have written out
in full. But once for all, let me say as an excuse, that it was most
difficult to decide what to omit. Birds, which have struggled in their own
homes, when settled in a body, nearly simultaneously in a new country,
would not be subject to much modification, for their mutual relations would