One or two of his published letters about this period have a special interest, for they show that his views on the origin of species were undergoing a gradual modification. Speaking of some strange variations in the flower of an orchideous plant,[122] he refers, half in jest, to "ugly facts, as Hooker, clinging (like me) to the orthodox faith, calls these and other abnormal vagaries"; and again, the following sentences do not come from a man who is firm in his belief[123]:-- "When Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston were at Darwin's last week, they (all four of them) ran a tilt against species further, I believe, than they are deliberately prepared to go--Wollaston least unorthodox. I cannot easily see how they can go so far, and not embrace the whole Lamarckian doctrine. Huxley held forth last week about the oxlip, which he says is unknown on the Continent. If we had met with it in Madeira and nowhere else, or the cowslip, should we not have voted them true species? Darwin finds, among his fifteen varieties of the common pigeon, three good genera and about fifteen good species, according to the received mode of species and genus-making of the best ornithologists, and the bony skeleton varying with the rest! After all, did we not come from an ourang, seeing that man is of the Old World, and not from the American type of anthropomorphous mammalia?" Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were again on the Continent in the summer of 1856, examining the drifts of Northern Germany, visiting Humboldt at Berlin, discussing geological questions, especially in regard to Carboniferous plants, at Breslau with Roemer and Goeppert; working over the Riesengebirge; then going on to Dresden, and passing through the Saxon Switzerland to Aussig. The coalfield north-west of the former city was not neglected, the great breccia beds of the Rothliegende were again examined, and account was taken of Ramsay's opinion that certain British Permian breccias were glacial in origin. Close attention was also bestowed upon the great masses of hard quartzose grit, through which the Elbe has carved its way--the Quader of Saxony; for this formation, "a grit wholly deficient in calcareous matter, corresponds to the more purely calcareous rock (Chalk) of Great Britain, and yet contains here and there the same shells." He did not neglect the Brown Coal[124] between Töplitz and Aussig, and, on reaching Prague, made the acquaintance of Barrande, who took him to see those older Palæozoic rocks among which the great palæontologist had been labouring for nearly a quarter of a century. Then the travellers proceeded to Vienna, and after that to the Styrian Alps, to visit various interesting sections in the Salzkammergut, such as the classic ground at Gosau and the Triassic limestones near Hallstadt, where the last survivors of the Palæozoic ages are entombed with the representatives of the period.