Well, what seems to me the weakest point in the book is the attempt to account for the formation of organs, the making of eyes, etc., by natural selection. Some of this reads quite Lamarckian.
The chapter on Hybridism is not a _weak_, but a _strong_ chapter. You have done wonders there. But still you have not accounted, as you may be held to account, for divergence up to a certain extent producing increased fertility of the crosses, but carried one short, almost imperceptible, step more, giving rise to sterility, or reversing the tendency. Very likely you are on the right track; but you have something to do yet in that department.
I am not insensible to your compliments, the very high compliment which you pay me in valuing my opinion. You evidently think more of it than I do, though from the way I write to you, and especially to Hooker, this might not be inferred from the reading of my letters.
I am free to say that I never learnt so much from one book as I have from yours. There remain a thousand things I long to say about it.
DEAR BRACE,--I should criticise various things in your last “Times” article, if you were here to talk it over with me.
If you expected Huxley to do what you criticise him for not doing, you would naturally be disappointed. His merit, and his way as a lecturer, is to select some good topic or point of view and make a clear exposition of it, the clearness of which very much depends upon his not scattering himself over too much ground. He naturally kept himself to matters he could handle well, and let alone those upon which, as we very well know, he had nothing in particular to say.
1. “Merest fancies,” “baseless fabric of a dream,” etc.
Why, what made Owen an evolutionist as early as Darwin? And what has made so many naturalists, Mivart, and lately Dana, for instance, evolutionists, who yet think nothing of Natural Selection?
But to illustrate. You allow that the evolutionary pedigree of the horse is made out. But what had “Natural Selection” to do with the making this out?
It would have been all the very same, both the evidence and the ground of the inference, if Natural Selection had never been propounded. There is no evidence how the forms were selected, there is simply the _fact_ of the series of forms, which, with other like evidence, brings conviction to most naturalists that one has somehow come from the other. And this conviction is about as strong to those who do not believe “Natural Selection” will explain it, as those who do.