Today | News | Books | Recipes Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History Booksee Letter 13.), and I
fully expect to find your observations most valuable. I am very sorry to
hear that your health is shattered; but I trust under a healthy climate
it may be restored. I can sympathise with you fully on this score, for
I have had bad health for many years, and fear I shall ever remain a
confirmed invalid. I am delighted to hear that you, with all your large
practical knowledge of Natural History, anticipated me in many respects
and concur with me. As you say, I have been thoroughly well attacked and
reviled (especially by entomologists--Westwood, Wollaston, and A. Murray
have all reviewed and sneered at me to their hearts' content), but I
care nothing about their attacks; several really good judges go a long
way with me, and I observe that all those who go some little way tend
to go somewhat further. What a fine philosophical mind your friend Mr.
Wallace has, and he has acted, in relation to me, like a true man with
a noble spirit. I see by your letter that you have grappled with
several of the most difficult problems, as it seems to me, in Natural
History--such as the distinctions between the different kinds of
varieties, representative species, etc. Perhaps I shall find some facts
in your paper on intermediate varieties in intermediate regions, on
which subject I have found remarkably little information. I cannot tell
you how glad I am to hear that you have attended to the curious point
of equatorial refrigeration. I quite agree that it must have been small;
yet the more I go into that question the more convinced I feel that
there was during the Glacial period some migration from north to south.
The sketch in the "Origin" gives a very meagre account of my fuller MS.
essay on this subject.
I shall be particularly obliged for a copy of your paper when published
(118/2. Probably a paper by Bates entitled "Contributions to an Insect
Fauna of the Amazon Valley" ("Trans. Entomol. Soc." Volume V., page 335,
1858-61).); and if any suggestions occur to me (not that you require
any) or questions, I will write and ask.
I have at once to prepare a new edition of the "Origin," (118/3. Third
Edition, March, 1861.), and I will do myself the pleasure of sending you
a copy; but it will be only very slightly altered.
Cases of neuter ants, divided into castes, with intermediate gradations
(which I imagine are rare) interest me much. See "Origin" on the
driver-ant, page 241 (please look at the passage.)
LETTER 119. TO T.H. HUXLEY.
(119/1. This refers to the first number of the new series of the
"Natural History Review," 1861, a periodical which Huxley was largely
instrumental in founding, and of which he was an editor (see Letter
107). The first series was published in Dublin, and ran to seven volumes
between 1854 and 1860. The new series came to an end in 1865.)
Down, January, 3rd [1861].
I have just finished No. 1 of the "Natural History Review," and must
congratulate you, as chiefly concerned, on its excellence. The whole
seems to me admirable,--so admirable that it is impossible that other
numbers should be so good, but it would be foolish to expect it. I am
rather a croaker, and I do rather fear that the merit of the articles
will be above the run of common readers and subscribers. I have been
much interested by your brain article. (119/2. The "Brain article" of
Huxley bore the title "On the Zoological Relations of Man with the
Lower Animals," and appeared in No. 1, January 1861, page 67. It was Mr.
Huxley's vindication of the unqualified contradiction given by him
at the Oxford meeting of the British Association to Professor Owen's
assertions as to the difference between the brains of man and the higher
apes. The sentence omitted by Owen in his lecture before the University
of Cambridge was a footnote on the close structural resemblance between
Homo and Pithecus, which occurs in his paper on the characters of the
class Mammalia in the "Linn. Soc. Journal," Volume II., 1857, page 20.
According to Huxley the lecture, or "Essay on the Classification of the
Mammalia," was, with this omission, a reprint of the Linnean paper. In
"Man's Place in Nature," page 110, note, Huxley remarks: "Surely it is
a little singular that the 'anatomist,' who finds it 'difficult' to
'determine the difference' between Homo and Pithecus, should yet range
them, on anatomical grounds, in distinct sub-classes.") What a complete
and awful smasher (and done like a "buttered angel") it is for Owen!
What a humbug he is to have left out the sentence in the lecture before
the orthodox Cambridge dons! I like Lubbock's paper very much: how well
he writes. (119/3. Sir John Lubbock's paper was a review of Leydig on
the Daphniidae. M'Donnell's was "On the Homologies of the Electric Organ
of the Torpedo," afterwards used in the "Origin" (see Edition VI., page
150).) M'Donnell, of course, pleases me greatly. But I am very curious
to know who wrote the Protozoa article: I shall hear, if it be not a
secret, from Lubbock. It strikes me as very good, and, by Jove, how Owen
is shown up--"this great and sound reasoner"! By the way, this reminds
me of a passage which I have just observed in Owen's address at Leeds,
which a clever reviewer might turn into good fun. He defines (page xc)
and further on amplifies his definition that creation means "a process
he knows not what." And in a previous sentence he says facts shake his
confidence that the Apteryx in New Zealand and Red Grouse in England are
"distinct creations." So that he has no confidence that these birds
were produced by "processes he knows not what!" To what miserable
inconsistencies and rubbish this truckling to opposite opinions leads
the great generaliser! (119/4. In the "Historical Sketch," which forms
part of the later editions of the "Origin," Mr. Darwin made use of
Owen's Leeds Address in the manner sketched above. See "Origin," Edition
VI., page xvii.)
Farewell: I heartily rejoice in the clear merit of this number. I hope
Mrs. Huxley goes on well. Etty keeps much the same, but has not got up
to the same pitch as when you were here. Farewell.
LETTER 120. TO JAMES LAMONT. Down, February 25th [1861].
I am extremely much obliged for your very kind present of your beautiful
work, "Seasons with the Sea-Horses;" and I have no doubt that I shall
find much interesting from so careful and acute an observer as yourself.
(120/1. "Seasons with the Sea-Horses; or, Sporting Adventures in the
Northern Seas." London, 1861. Mr. Lamont (loc. cit., page 273) writes:
"The polar bear seems to me to be nothing more than a variety of the
bears inhabiting Northern Europe, Asia, and America; and it surely
requires no very great stretch of the imagination to suppose that
this variety was originally created, not as we see him now, but by
individuals of Ursus arctos in Siberia, who, finding their means of
subsistence running short, and pressed by hunger, ventured on the ice
and caught some seals. These individuals would find that they could
make a subsistence |