on opinion being entirely dependent on longitude! ... With respect to Design, I feel more inclined to show a white flag than to fire my usual long-range shot. I like to try and ask you a puzzling question, but when you return the compliment I have great doubts whether it is a fair way of arguing. If anything is designed, certainly man must be: one's "inner consciousness" (though a false guide) tells one so; yet I cannot admit that man's rudimentary mammae... were designed. If I was to say I believed this, I should believe it in the same incredible manner as the orthodox believe the Trinity in Unity. You say that you are in a haze; I am in thick mud; the orthodox would say in fetid, abominable mud; yet I cannot keep out of the question. My dear Gray, I have written a deal of nonsense. Yours most cordially, C. DARWIN. 1862. [Owing to the illness from scarlet fever of one of his boys, he took a house at Bournemouth in the autumn. He wrote to Dr. Gray from Southampton (August 21, 1862):-- "We are a wretched family, and ought to be exterminated. We slept here to rest our poor boy on his journey to Bournemouth, and my poor dear wife sickened with scarlet fever, and has had it pretty sharply, but is recovering well. There is no end of trouble in this weary world. I shall not feel safe till we are all at home together, and when that will be I know not. But it is foolish complaining." Dr. Gray used to send postage stamps to the scarlet fever patient; with regard to this good-natured deed my father wrote-- "I must just recur to stamps; my little man has calculated that he will now have 6 stamps which no other boy in the school has. Here is a triumph. Your last letter was plaistered with many coloured stamps, and he long surveyed the envelope in bed with much quiet satisfaction." The greater number of the letters of 1862 deal with the Orchid work, but the wave of conversion to Evolution was still spreading, and reviews and letters bearing on the subject still came in numbers. As an example of the odd letters he received may be mentioned one which arrived in January of this year "from a German homoeopathic doctor, an ardent admirer of the 'Origin.' Had himself published nearly the same sort of book, but goes much deeper. Explains the origin of plants and animals on the principles of homoeopathy or by the law of spirality. Book fell dead in Germany. Therefore would I translate it and publish it in England."] CHARLES DARWIN TO T.H. HUXLEY. Down, [January?] 14 [1862]. My dear Huxley,