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At first I thought I ought to continue the correspondence privately with Mr. Darwin, and explain to him that his letter was insufficient, but on reflection I felt that little good was likely to come of a second letter, if what I had already written was not enough. I therefore wrote to the Athenaeum and gave a condensed account of the facts contained in the last ten or a dozen pages.
Most readers will, I think, rise from the perusal of these works with the conviction that, while on certain points of detail it is clear that, through the want of knowledge concerning the action of marine organisms in the open ocean, Darwin was betrayed into some grave errors, yet the main foundations of his argument have not been seriously impaired by the new facts observed in the deep-sea researches, or by the severe criticism to which his theory has been subjected during the last ten years.
But everyone connected with the subject acknowledges Darwin as the master, and says that it was his work which converted the world to a belief in evolution. We can have no better preparation for an intelligent understanding of this subject than to consider carefully the life of this remarkable man and the circumstances under which he came to his epoch-making conclusions.
Darwin uses expressions which imply that the natural forms which surround us, because they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only generally, but not particularly designed a view at once superficial and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the how and not the why of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just where it was before.
We do not think that, with all his matchless ingenuity, Mr. Darwin has found any instance which so well illustrates his own theory of the improved descendant under the elevating influences of natural selection exterminating the progenitor whose specialities he has exaggerated as he himself affords us in this work.
And now, what did Darwin really discover? I do not remember how this animal imposed himself illustratively on the Evolution controversy; but there was no getting away from him then; and I am old-fashioned enough to be unable to get away from him now. How did he come by his long neck?
Darwin asked me to drink tea, and I perceived that I owed to my literature the pleasure of passing the evening with this most agreeable woman. We talked and conversed upon various literary subjects till it was dark; when Mrs.
But the circumstances or agencies that check the increase of any species of animal are, as Darwin says, very obscure and but little known. There is no creature with which man has surrounded himself that seems so much like a product of civilization, so much like the result of development on special lines and in special fields, as the honey-bee.
Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms, Claim kindred there, and have our claim allowed,
Philosophical minds form various conceptions for harmonizing the two views theoretically. Mr. Darwin harmonizes and explains them naturally. Adaptation to the conditions of existence is the result of natural selection; unity of type, of unity of descent.
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