“In the February number of a well-known German scientific journal, _Kosmos_, {39} Dr. Ernest Krause published a sketch of the ‘Life of Erasmus Darwin,’ the author of the ‘Zoonomia,’ ‘Botanic Garden,’ and other works. This article bears the title of a ‘Contribution to the History of the Descent Theory’; and Dr. Krause has kindly allowed my brother Erasmus and myself to have a translation made of it for publication in this country.” Then came a note as follows:— “Mr. Dallas has undertaken the translation, and his scientific reputation, together with his knowledge of German, is a guarantee for its accuracy.” I ought to have suspected inaccuracy where I found so much consciousness of accuracy, but I did not. However this may be, Mr. Darwin pins himself down with every circumstance of preciseness to giving Dr. Krause’s article as it appeared in _Kosmos_,—the whole article, and nothing but the article. No one could know this better than Mr. Darwin. On the second page of Mr. Darwin’s preface there is a small-type note saying that my work, “Evolution, Old and New,” had appeared since the publication of Dr. Krause’s article. Mr. Darwin thus distinctly precludes his readers from supposing that any passage they might meet with could have been written in reference to, or by the light of, my book. If anything appeared condemnatory of that book, it was an undesigned coincidence, and would show how little worthy of consideration I must be when my opinions were refuted in advance by one who could have no bias in regard to them. Knowing that if the article I was about to read appeared in February, it must have been published before my book, which was not out till three months later, I saw nothing in Mr. Darwin’s preface to complain of, and felt that this was only another instance of my absurd vanity having led me to rush to conclusions without sufficient grounds,—as if it was likely, indeed, that Mr. Darwin should think what I had said of sufficient importance to be affected by it. It was plain that some one besides myself, of whom I as yet knew nothing, had been writing about the elder Darwin, and had taken much the same line concerning him that I had done. It was for the benefit of this person, then, that Dr. Krause’s paragraph was intended. I returned to a becoming sense of my own insignificance, and began to read what I supposed to be an accurate translation of Dr. Krause’s article as it originally appeared, before “Evolution, Old and New,” was published. On pp. 3 and 4 of Dr. Krause’s part of Mr. Darwin’s book (pp. 133 and 134 of the book itself), I detected a sub-apologetic tone which a little surprised me, and a notice of the fact that Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet had used the word “Darwinising.” Mr. R. Garnett had called my attention to this, and I had mentioned it in “Evolution, Old and New,” but the paragraph only struck me as being a little odd.