answer just read; you take a lofty and dignified position, to which you are so well entitled. (In a letter to Sir J.D. Hooker he wrote: "I much like Lyell's letter. But all this squabbling will greatly sink scientific men. I have seen sneers already in the 'Times'.") I suspect that if you had inserted a few more superlatives in speaking of the several authors there would have been none of this horrid noise. No one, I am sure, who knows you could doubt about your hearty sympathy with every one who makes any little advance in science. I still well remember my surprise at the manner in which you listened to me in Hart Street on my return from the "Beagle's" voyage. You did me a world of good. It is horridly vexatious that so frank and apparently amiable a man as Falconer should have behaved so. (It is to this affair that the extract from a letter to Falconer, given in volume i., refers.) Well it will all soon be forgotten... [In reply to the above-mentioned letter of my father's to the "Athenaeum", an article appeared in that Journal (May 2nd, 1863, page 586), accusing my father of claiming for his views the exclusive merit of "connecting by an intelligible thread of reasoning" a number of facts in morphology, etc. The writer remarks that, "The different generalizations cited by Mr. Darwin as being connected by an intelligible thread of reasoning exclusively through his attempt to explain specific transmutation are in fact related to it in this wise, that they have prepared the minds of naturalists for a better reception of such attempts to explain the way of the origin of species from species." To this my father replied in the "Athenaeum" of May 9th, 1863:] Down, May 5 [1863].