Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol 2 | Page 4

the book
was published.]
C. LYELL TO CHARLES DARWIN. (Part of this letter is given in the
'Life of Sir Charles Lyell,' volume ii. page 325.) October 3d, 1859.
My dear Darwin,
I have just finished your volume and right glad I am that I did my best
with Hooker to persuade you to publish it without waiting for a time
which probably could never have arrived, though you lived till the age
of a hundred, when you had prepared all your facts on which you
ground so many grand generalizations.
It is a splendid case of close reasoning, and long substantial argument
throughout so many pages; the condensation immense, too great
perhaps for the uninitiated, but an effective and important preliminary
statement, which will admit, even before your detailed proofs appear,

of some occasional useful exemplification, such as your pigeons and
cirripedes, of which you make such excellent use.
I mean that, when, as I fully expect, a new edition is soon called for,
you may here and there insert an actual case to relieve the vast number
of abstract propositions. So far as I am concerned, I am so well
prepared to take your statements of facts for granted, that I do not think
the "pieces justificatives" when published will make much difference,
and I have long 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
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,