I do NOT agree with your remark that I make Natural Selection do too much work. You will perhaps reply that every man rides his hobby-horse to death; and that I am in the galloping state. LETTER 114. TO C. LYELL. 15, Marine Parade, Eastbourne, Friday 5th [October, 1860]. I have two notes to thank you for, and I return Wollaston. It has always seemed to me rather strange that Forbes, Wollaston and Co. should argue, from the presence of allied, and not identical species in islands, for the former continuity of land. They argue, I suppose, from the species being allied in different regions of the same continent, though specifically distinct. But I think one might on the creative doctrine argue with equal force in a directly reverse manner, and say that, as species are so often markedly distinct, yet allied, on islands, all our continents existed as islands first, and their inhabitants were first created on these islands, and since became mingled together, so as not to be so distinct as they now generally are on islands. LETTER 115. TO H.G. BRONN. Down, October 5th [1860]. I ought to apologise for troubling you, but I have at last carefully read your excellent criticisms on my book. (115/1. Bronn added critical remarks to his German translation of the "Origin": see "Life and Letters," II., page 279.) I agree with much of them, and wholly with your final sentence. The objections and difficulties which may be urged against my view are indeed heavy enough almost to break my back, but it is not yet broken! You put very well and very fairly that I can in no one instance explain the course of modification in any particular instance. I could make some sort of answer to your case of the two rats; and might I not turn round and ask him who believes in the separate creation of each species, why one rat has a longer tail or shorter ears than another? I presume that most people would say that these characters were of some use, or stood in some connection with other parts; and if so, Natural Selection would act on them. But as you put the case, it tells well against me. You argue most justly against my question, whether the many species were created as eggs (115/2. See Letter 110.) or as mature, etc. I certainly had no right to ask that question. I fully agree that there might have been as well a hundred thousand creations as eight or ten, or only one. But then, on the view of eight or ten creations (i.e. as many as there are distinct types of structure) we can on my view understand the homological and embryological resemblance of all the organisms of each type, and on this ground almost alone I disbelieve in the innumerable acts of creation. There are only two points on which I think you have misunderstood me. I refer only to one Glacial period as affecting the distribution of organic beings; I did not wish even to allude to the doubtful evidence of glacial action in the Permian and Carboniferous periods. Secondly, I do not believe