With this general attitude, it is interesting to find Darwin, in one of his few temptations to sharp retort, checked and repressed by the great fighter Huxley. Darwin submits the draft of a crisp letter, asking Huxley to criticize, and the latter suggests omissions: ‘Though Thomson deserved it and more, I thought it would be better to refrain. If I say a savage thing, it is only “Pretty Fanny’s way”; but if you do, it is not likely to be forgotten.’[350] Huxley and other friends also restrained Darwin in perhaps the most annoying of his controversial affairs, that with Samuel Butler over the translation of Krause’s Life of Erasmus Darwin. It is not necessary for us to attempt to unthread the complicated tangle of this dispute, since we may start with the confident assumption that both men were perfectly sincere in their good intentions. The curious may read the whole story in the Life of Butler by Henry Festing Jones, and it is pleasant to find that the biographers of Butler and of Darwin were able to come together and by comparing unprinted documents straighten out the difficulty to their mutual satisfaction. With his fellow-workers, those who were following the same lines of research from the same general point of view, Darwin’s relations were most cordial and sympathetic. There was no jealousy, no rivalry, no undue sensitiveness. We have indeed seen that in his treatment of his predecessors, notably Lamarck, there was a suggestion of what in any one else might be taken for a jealous attitude. But all the dealings with Wallace nobly refute the possibility of any such suggestion. And at all times and under all circumstances Darwin was ready to recognize and to proclaim the merits and achievements of those who were laboring beside him. When there was any question of priority in an idea or a discovery, he refused to assert himself unduly: ‘I have always had a strong feeling that no one had better defend his own priority. I cannot say that I am as indifferent to the subject as I ought to be, but one can avoid doing anything in consequence.’[351] When a scientist, whether known or unknown, applied to him for assistance or suggestion, he was always ready to supply it, so far as was in his power. Above all, he was appreciative, almost to excess, of any assistance that was rendered to him, and his gratitude to his friends for supporting and sustaining him and forwarding his views is touching in its naïve earnestness. To Huxley, to Hooker, to Lyell, to Gray, to Häckel, to a dozen others, he speaks with enthusiastic acknowledgment of their efforts and their contributions, and, as Huxley points out, he was ready to bestow almost the same gratitude for services that in themselves appeared to be absurdly insignificant.