Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol 2 | Page 5

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.
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 not be much disturbed. But I quite agree with you, that
in time they ought to undergo some. In Bermuda and Madeira they
have, as I believe, been kept constant by the frequent arrival, and the
crossing with unaltered immigrants of the same species from the
mainland. In Bermuda this can be proved, in Madeira highly probable,
as shown me by letters from E.V. Harcourt. Moreover, there are ample
grounds for believing that the crossed offspring of the new immigrants
(fresh blood as breeders would say), and old colonists of the same
species would be extra vigorous, and would be the most likely to
survive; thus the effects of such crossing in keeping the old colonists
unaltered would be much aided.
ON GALAPAGOS PRODUCTIONS HAVING AMERICAN TYPE
ON VIEW OF CREATION.
I cannot agree with you, that species if created to struggle with
American forms, would have to be created on the American type. Facts
point diametrically the other way. Look at the unbroken and untilled
ground in La Plata, COVERED with European products, which have no
near affinity to the indigenous products. They are not American types
which conquer the aborigines. So in every island throughout the world.
Alph. De Candolle's results (though he does not see its full importance),
that thoroughly well naturalised [plants] are in general very different
from the aborigines (belonging in large proportion of cases to
non-indigenous genera) is most important always to bear in mind. Once
for all, I am sure, you will understand that I thus write dogmatically for
brevity sake.

ON THE CONTINUED CREATION Of MONADS.
This doctrine is superfluous (and groundless) on the theory of Natural
Selection, which implies no NECESSARY tendency to progression. A
monad, if no deviation in its structure profitable to it under its
EXCESSIVELY SIMPLE conditions of life occurred, might remain
unaltered from long before the Silurian Age to the present day. I grant
there will generally be a tendency to advance in complexity of
organisation, though in beings fitted for very simple conditions it
would be slight and slow. How could a complex organisation profit a
monad? if it did not profit it there would be no advance. The Secondary
Infusoria differ but little from the living. The parent monad form might
perfectly well survive unaltered and fitted for its simple conditions,
whilst the offspring of this very monad might become fitted for more
complex conditions. The one primordial prototype of all living and
extinct creatures may, it is possible, be now alive! Moreover, as you
say, higher forms might be occasionally degraded, the snake Typhlops
SEEMS (?!) to have the habits of earth-worms. So that fresh creatures
of simple forms seem to me wholly superfluous.
"MUST YOU NOT ASSUME A PRIMEVAL CREATIVE POWER
WHICH DOES NOT ACT WITH UNIFORMITY, OR HOW COULD
MAN SUPERVENE?"
I am not sure that I understand your remarks which follow the above.
We must under present knowledge assume the creation of