translated. I may add that I had obtained Dr. Krause's consent for a
translation, and had arranged with Mr. Dallas before your book was
announced. I remember this because Mr. Dallas wrote to tell me of
the advertisement.--I remain, yours faithfully,

C. DARWIN."


This was not a letter I could accept. If Mr. Darwin had said that by
some inadvertence, which he was unable to excuse or account for, a
blunder had been made which he would at once correct so far as was in
his power by a letter to the Times or the Athenaeum, and that a
notice of the erratum should be printed on a flyleaf and pasted into
all unsold copies of the "Life of Erasmus Darwin," there would have
been no more heard about the matter from me; but when Mr. Darwin
maintained that it was a common practice to take advantage of an
opportunity of revising a work to interpolate a covert attack upon an
opponent, and at the same time to misdate the interpolated matter by
expressly stating that it appeared months sooner than it actually
did, and prior to the work which it attacked; when he maintained that
what was being done was "so common a practice that it never
occurred," to him--the writer of some twenty volumes--to do what all
literary men must know to be inexorably requisite, I thought this was
going far beyond what was permissible in honourable warfare, and that
it was time, in the interests of literary and scientific morality,
even more than in my own, to appeal to public opinion. I was
particularly struck with the use of the words "it never occurred to
me," and felt how completely of a piece it was with the opening
paragraph of the "Origin of Species." It was not merely that it did
not occur to Mr. Darwin to state that the article had been modified