Style clear and good, but now and then wants revision for little matters (p. 97, self-fertilizes itself, etc.). Then your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable at least for the present. I know some people who never have any difficulties to speak of. The moment I understood your premises, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on. Well, if one admits your premises, I do not see how he is to stop short of your conclusions, as a probable hypothesis at least. It naturally happens that my review of your book does not exhibit anything like the full force of the impression the book has made upon me. Under the circumstances I suppose I do your theory more good here, by bespeaking for it a fair and favorable consideration, and by standing noncommitted as to its full conclusion, than I should if I announced myself a convert; nor could I say the latter, with truth. 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. Enough for the present. 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. Ever yours, ASA GRAY. TO CHARLES L. BRACE. 1861 (?) 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?